Oman, Vatican announce establishment of diplomatic ties

The Vatican and Oman have established diplomatic relations, a joint statement says, three months after a visit by Pope Francis to the Gulf.

There are currently 12 Catholic priests working in four parishes in Oman and the local population of nearly 4.5 million people includes a “significant number of foreign workers,” it says.

The pontiff visited Bahrain in November, his second visit to the Gulf since becoming pope in 2013. His first visit was to the United Arab Emirates in 2019.

Oman’s parishes are part of the Apostolic Vicariate of Southern Arabia, which is based in Abu Dhabi.

Most of the country’s Catholics are foreign workers from elsewhere in the Middle East and the Philippines, India and Pakistan, the statement said.

Kuwait was the first Gulf country to establish diplomatic relations with the Holy See in 1968. Thirty years later, the Vatican established ties with Yemen, followed by Bahrain in 2000, Qatar in 2002 and the United Arab Emirates in 2007.

There are about 3.5 million Christians — some 75 percent of them Catholic — in the Gulf, the birthplace of Islam.