Carlos Ximenes Belo

Carlos Filipe Ximenes Belo was the Catholic bishop of Dili during the Indonesian occupation of East Timor, and shared the 1996 Nobel Peace Prize with José Ramos-Horta. He was born in Wailakama on the north coast of Portuguese Timor, the fifth child of a schoolteacher who died when he was two. He joined the Salesians, studied in Portugal and Rome, and returned in 1981. He was made apostolic administrator of Dili in 1983, at a point when the church was the only institution in the territory not under Indonesian control. He used that position to document killings and to shelter people. In 1989 he wrote to the United Nations Secretary General asking for a referendum on self-determination, a letter that made him a target of the Indonesian authorities and was published against his expectations. He gave sanctuary in his own residence to survivors of the Santa Cruz cemetery massacre in 1991 and passed accounts of it out of the country. The Nobel citation credited him with working for a just and peaceful solution. He resigned in 2002, citing exhaustion, shortly after East Timor became independent. In September 2022 a Dutch magazine published allegations that he had sexually abused boys in Timor over many years. A Vatican spokesperson confirmed the following day that the Church had imposed disciplinary sanctions on him in 2020, restricting his ministry and movement and barring him from contact with children and with East Timor. He had been living in Portugal and working as a missionary in Mozambique in the years before the allegations were published. The Nobel Foundation said it had no procedure for withdrawing a prize once awarded.

MyHistorian
A causal knowledge graph of history