Early Life and Religious Vocation
The fifth child of Domingos Vaz Filipe and Ermelinda Baptista Filipe, Carlos Filipe Ximenes Belo was born in the village of Wailakama, near Vemasse, on the north coast of East Timor. His father, a schoolteacher, died two years later. His childhood years were spent in Catholic schools at Baucau and Ossu, before he proceeded to the Dare minor seminary outside Dili, from which he graduated in 1968. From 1969 until 1981, apart from periods of practical training (1974–1976) in East Timor and in Macau, he was in Portugal and Rome where, having become a member of the Salesian Society, he studied philosophy and theology before being ordained a priest in 1980.
Returning to East Timor in July 1981 he became a teacher for 20 months, then director for two months, at the Salesian College at Fatumaca.
Read more about this topic: Carlos Filipe Ximenes Belo
Famous quotes containing the words early, life, religious and/or vocation:
“Long before I wrote stories, I listened for stories. Listening for them is something more acute than listening to them. I suppose it’s an early form of participation in what goes on. Listening children know stories are there. When their elders sit and begin, children are just waiting and hoping for one to come out, like a mouse from its hole.”
—Eudora Welty (b. 1909)
“Most of one’s life is one prolonged effort to prevent oneself thinking.”
—Aldous Huxley (1894–1963)
“Primarily I am a passionately religious man, and my novels must be written from the depth of my religious experience.”
—D.H. (David Herbert)
“A vocation makes us unthinking; that is its greatest blessing. For it is a bulwark behind which we are permitted to withdraw when commonplace doubts and cares assail us.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)