Martinho da Costa Lopes

Martinho da Costa Lopes (11 November 1918 – 27 February 1991) was an East Timorese religious and political leader. He was a priest of the Catholic Church, the highest-ranking official of the Church in East Timor from 1977 to 1983, and a member of the National Assembly in Lisbon.

Biography Martinho da Costa Lopes was born on 11 November 1918 in the Manatuto district of Portuguese Timor. He grew up in an era when the Portuguese church, in what was then Portuguese Timor, cooperated closely with the Portuguese colonial government. He attended the Minor Seminary of Nossa Senhora de Fátima in Soibada from 1935 to 1938 and then spent two years at the minor seminary in Macau and six years at the major seminary there. He returned to East Timor in September 1946 to teach at Colégio de S. Francisco Xavier and Colégio-Liceu Dr. Francisco Machado. He was ordained a priest on 18 April 1948. He then took up pastoral assignments in Bobonaro.

By 1975 he was vicar general of Diocese of Dili, The two of them joined in opposition to the Indonesian invasion of December 1975 and Ribeiro showed courage in communicating his views to foreign reporters, but he found himself close to nervous collapse by late 1977. The Diocese of Díli had once been part of the ecclesiastical hierarchy that mirrored that of Portugal's colonies, but on 1 January 1976 had been given exempt status, making it directly subject to the pope. Some 25-30% of the population of East Timor was Catholic in 1975, Pope John Paul removed Lopes as administrator in May 1983.

Since he was not a bishop, he served at the sufferance of the pope and had no recourse. Many Timorese clergy wrote to the Vatican to protest his removal. He continued to campaign on behalf of the Timorese, mobilizing support worldwide on the basis of universal human rights to counterbalance the anticolonial rhetoric of guerillas resisting the Indonesian.

His name remains associated with a historic re-orientation of the Timorese church towards local culture. During the years he led the diocese, the Church, re-oriented from a Portuguese colonial viewpoint to the service of the indigenous population, grew in numbers not seen during centuries of Portuguese missionary activity.

Lopes was succeeded as Apostolic Administrator by Carlos Felipe Ximenes Belo in 1988.