Pope Francis concludes landmark three-day visit to the UAE by holding mass attended by around 180,000 Catholics…
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WEB DESK / Abu Dhabi
Pope Francis, the Head of the Catholic Church celebrated a historic Papal Mass to 180,000 Catholics in the United Arab Emirates, which was televised around the world earlier Tuesday.
The scale of the gathering, which took place at Zayed Sports Stadium in Abu Dhabi, saw people travel hours and days to be part of the event.
Cheers erupted inside and outside the stadium as Pope Francis arrived and moved through the crowd in his open-sided popemobile before the mass. Chants of “Viva il Papa” and “We love you” accompanied him as he waved to the crowd.
Francis, who has made outreach to Muslim communities a cornerstone of his papacy, is on an historic three-day visit to the United Arab Emirates.
The mass celebration is being billed as the largest show of public Christian worship on the Peninsula.
“We have to say it is really a big event for us which we never expected,” said Sumitha Pinto, an Indian native who has lived in the UAE for nearly 20 years.
Out of the roughly nine million people living in the UAE, the Catholic Church estimates as many as one million are Catholic.
The mass celebration comes a day after making a broad appeal for Christian and Muslim leaders to promote peace and reject war.
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It wasn’t just the sense of history in relation to where this mass was taking place, or the importance of it being the first visit by a pontiff to the Arabian Peninsula. For many it was personal. The opportunity to attend a papal mass is viewed as a once in a lifetime experience.
Something also very tangibly changed within that moment. The UAE has always allowed people of all religions to freely practice their faith, even setting aside land to build shrines for people to worship. But rarely has it so actively encouraged, or even celebrated, its own diversity to such a spectacular degree.
Shaikh Nahayan Bin Mabarak Al Nahyan, Minister of Tolerance with Noora Al Kaabi, Minister of Culture and Knowledge Development.
This wasn’t only about Catholics. Although two million Catholics live in the UAE and the vast majority of the congregation on Tuesday were Catholic, some 4,000 were Muslim, and over 100 nationalities were in attendance.
Prayers were said in six languages, press hailed from every corner of the globe, and the real message — although soothing for Catholics to feel representation and acceptance in their home away from home — was one of togetherness.
At an interfaith meeting on Monday, Pope Francis and Sheikh Ahmed al-Tayeb – the grand imam of Egypt’s Al-Azhar – signed a joint statement on “human fraternity” and their hopes for world peace.
Francis said that faith leaders have a duty to reject war as he called for religious freedom in the Muslim-majority region.