AWALI, Bahrain (Reuters) – Pope Francis said Mass for 1000’s of Catholics in Bahrain on Saturday, thrilling members of the small foreign Catholic community from across the Gulf and urging them show kindness to their hosts, even in the event that they are sometimes looked down on.
The group of about 30,000 folks that filled Bahrain’s National Stadium was the second-largest gathering for a papal Mass on the Arabian Peninsula, following one which drew greater than 100,000 within the United Arab Emirates in 2019.
“This can be a miracle,” said Mary Grace Fortes, 36, a Filipino who works on the reception of a hotel in Bahrain. “So essential for us.”
Like many Filipino women who work outside their country, Fortes is married and sends a refund home to assist support her family, including her husband and 16-year-old son.
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Lots of of Catholic foreign employees were bussed in over the 25-km (16 mile) King Fahd Causeway that links Bahrain with Saudia Arabia, where there aren’t any churches and where Catholics cannot worship openly.
“The Bahrainis arranged all the pieces perfectly for us,” said Jos Chazoor, 53, who’s from Kerala in India and works as a manager for a medical equipment company in Saudi Arabia.
Chazoor’s 75-year-old mother was too overcome with emotion to answer a reporter’s questions just before the pope arrived within the packed stadium to an enthusiastic welcome by faithful waving yellow-and-white Vatican flags.
“She is just too thrilled to speak,” said Chazoor, who drives together with his mother over the causeway from Saudi Arabia usually to attend Mass in one in every of Bahrain’s two churches, which offer pastoral take care of the some 160,000 Catholics in Bahrain.
In his homily, Francis appeared to praise Bahrain’s relatively open policy towards non-Muslims.
“This very land is a living image of coexistence in diversity, and indeed a picture of our world, increasingly marked by the constant migration of peoples and by a pluralism of ideas, customs and traditions,” he said.
Foreign employees, a lot of them from Asia, provide the backbone of Gulf economies, working in sectors corresponding to construction, hospitality, transport and the oil and gas sector.
The International Labour Organisation says the Gulf’s migrant employees have long faced problems including exploitation by recruitment agencies and employers, poor work conditions, limited access to justice and limited or no freedom of association.
Francis urged his listeners to be kind even to those native people within the Gulf area who don’t treat them well, saying this was key to the Gospel message of loving your enemies.
He said they need to all the time be “persevering in good even when evil is finished to us, breaking the spiral of vengeance, disarming violence, demilitarizing the guts”.
As Francis was driven on a open popemobile through the group on the stadium’s pitch just before the beginning of the Mass, a speaker on the altar platform shouted “God bless the pope, God bless the royal family.”
The prayers of the faithful in the course of the Mass were read in languages spoken by foreign employees including Tagalog, Swahili, Malayalam, Tamil and Konkani.
The Mass was attended by one in every of the sons of King Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa and several other government ministers.
(Additional reporting by Ghaida Ghantous in Dubai; Editing by Michael Perry)
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