Carlos Filipe Ximenes Belo - Early Life and Religious Vocation

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:

    [My early stories] are the work of a living writer whom I know in a sense, but can never meet.
    Elizabeth Bowen (1899–1973)

    What quarrel, what harshness, what unbelief in each other can subsist in the presence of a great calamity, when all the artificial vesture of our life is gone, and we are all one with each other in primitive mortal needs?
    George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)

    I have been grateful to you from the day you turned your attention to the follies and fanaticisms of religious sects. Against those fools and impostors you employ the most appropriate weapons: to use others would be to imitate them. It is by ridicule that they must be attacked, and by scorn that they must be punished.
    Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl Chesterfield (1694–1773)

    Along the journey we commonly forget its goal. Almost every vocation is chosen and entered upon as a means to a purpose but is ultimately continued as a final purpose in itself. Forgetting our objectives is the most frequent stupidity in which we indulge ourselves.
    Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)