Pope Francis Makes Historic Visit To United Arab Emirates

Pope Francis on Sunday became the first-ever leader of the Roman Catholic Church to visit a Sunni Muslim Gulf nation, after being invited by Abu Dhabi’s crown prince to attend an interfaith conference. The United Arab Emirates is home to approximately 1 million Roman Catholics—many of them migrant workers from the Philippines and India—and is considered a relative beacon of tolerance. The pope will hold a Mass service on Tuesday that is expected to draw upwards of 120,000 people and also will meet with the grand imam of Cairo’s al-Azhar mosque, one of the most revered teaching institutions in the Sunni Muslim world. Francis last week described the visit as “a new page in the history of relations between religions,” adding that “faith in God unites and does not divide; it draws us closer despite differences; it distances us from hostilities and aversion.” The Vatican hopes that the trip will serve as a springboard to the loosening of restrictions on the construction of churches in the Middle East, particularly in Saudi Arabia where non-Islamic houses of worship are prohibited. Francis has been criticized for not being more vocal about the persecution of the region’s Christians, hundreds of thousands of which have been displaced or killed in the wake of the so-called Arab Spring upheavals.