If you go to daily Mass, you know it’s pretty unusual to run across much of a crowd.
If you go to Mass at your local parish, there may be only a handful of people there, many of them retired, with maybe a few homeschool families to round things out.
If you go to Mass at a New-man Centre, or a downtown ca-thedral during the lunch hour, things are a bit different–at those places, there might well be a few hundred people at a daily Mass.
A congregation of more than 1,000 would take most Ameri-cans by surprise at a weekday Mass, especially at a parish with four or five Masses every day of the week – and sometimes several more. But a recent visitor to St. Mary’s parish church in Dubai found exactly that.
St.Mary’s Catholic Parish is one of the largest parishes in the world, and a center of life for the Catholics who come to live and work in an Arabian city whose population has tripled in the last 20 years – mostly because of the migrants and their children who make up 85% of Dubai’s popu-lation.
Founded in 1967, and staffed by Capuchins, mostly from an Indian province, St.Mary’s is one of two Catholic churches in the emirate of Dubai – the parish is responsible for at least 300,000 parishioners, though some esti-mates are much larger.
The parish is a lifeline to Catholic migrants living in Dubai – many of whom live there in adverse and gravely difficult situations.
Dubai, the largest city in the United Arab Emirates, is a hard place to understand. Just 60 years ago, the city could hardly be said to exist — it was a coastal outpost on the Arabian Peninsula with a population under 50,000.
But oil, struck in Dubai in 1966, changed everything. The Emirati citizens of Dubai became fabulously rich, and there was money to be made in Dubai for anyone who could balance a ledger, lay a row of bricks, or clean a toilet.
Infrastructure sprang up, and independent monarchies along the Persian Gulf formed the United Arab Emirates — a political union of convenience, which allows for seven small states to maintain their monarchical sovereignty, while banding together to make easier doing business with the rest of the world.
Dubai is a place unlike any other — it is something of the wild west, something of a booming oil town, something of an absolute Islamic monarchy, and something of an increasingly cosmopolitan global city. It is home to both the world’s tallest building, and to some of the world’s most abject poverty.