The little first man of Flores: a Catholic one?

Frank Westerman is a Dutch journalist who worked for some time in Russia and Turkey as a foreign correspondant. In his twenties he studied agricultural biology, had much interest in evolution, any way interest in many things. From 2000 on he publishes books with scientific themes, in a funny way. While reading him you have often have the feeling that he writes about anything interesting he meets, but still he is able to concentrate on a major theme.

His most recent book (in translation We, the humans) is about the quest for the first human being, in case related to the findings in Flores of fossiles of what may have been the link between apes and human beings. The first of these findings were from the 1950s when Catholic missionary Theodor Verhoeven SVD (of the order of the Divine Word) discovered in a cave in West Flores fossile bones of a very small examplar of the homo Floriensis. Unfortunately he should have digged deeper, because only few decades later better examples of the same were found, besides huge mouses, giant bats. Apparently animals could grow bigger, humans in Flores were small, according to modern standards.
Westerman begins his books with reports as 'writer in residence' with students of the Humanities Department of Leiden University, late 2016. His students find data about missionary Verhoeven, who was a well trained teacher of Latin with a PhD on a Latin theological tekst, but also some training in archeology of Pompei, the Italian town covered by a volcanic eruption in about 70 CE.
They visit the SVD museum in Steijl. The excavations in Java by  Dubois are also recalled at large, until in the last chapter many new findings in Georgia are mentioned from the last decade. So, besides the discovery of the fossiles in Flores, many other items enter the book, which sometimes also has more philosophical thinking about the difference between animals and humans and the bad role of religion in negating the theory of evolution.
Westerman also came to Flores to see the site itself. Here in Flores he met the daughter of a Protestant minister who discovered the truth about the 1966 killings of suspected Communists in Sumba. She later married a Catholic man in Flores. She was allowed to marry, but had to observe the initiation rituals, seven days in the adat house of Leko Lembo. But through clever discussion she could also buy off this obligation: a liberal donation of palm wine (236).
Chapters 18 and 19 (or pp. 237-258) are about the killings of 1966 in the Maumere region, finally decribed by Father John Prior SVD. It is the story of an internal fight in the Catholic Party of Flores around late 1950s, how the elite took revenge by giving the label of 'communists' to critical people, how the clergy obeyed and dares not even to give a proper burial to between the 800-2000 who were killed: no digging has been taken place, just only 'covering the whole affair with sand'. In this way Westerman is connecting the story of the 1966 killings with the main theme of the book, the quest for the oldest man on the earth, also in Flores.
There are many themes in this book. One of these is a continuing theme of Westerman: leaving the religion of his youth and becoming an atheist. Another is his surprise about tenacity of religion and even its return. But he did not see a first Catholic some 100.000 years ago in Flores. Not yet.