East Timor

East Timor is a largely Christian state in Southeast Asia that occupies the eastern half of the island of Timor in the Indonesian archipelago. At the time of Portugal's relinquishment of colonial control over East Timor in 1974, only one third of the population espoused Catholicism as their religious faith, the majority worshipping luliks or animist objects. There was no pressure for mass conversion to Catholicism on the part of the Portuguese colonizers, though there had already been some missionary work mixing local ancestor worship and Catholic doctrine, and emphasis had been placed by the missionaries on the apparent parallelisms between traditional indigenous Makasae mythology and the Old Testament. Following World War II, the Catholic Church used Tetum, an indigenous East Timor language, thereby rendering ...