The Holy See announced this Thursday, February 23, the establishment of diplomatic relations with the Sultanate of Oman, a first in the links between the Catholic Church and this Sunni petromonarchy of the Gulf where Islam is the state religion.
The Holy See and the sultanate of oman “ have decided to establish, on the basis of the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations of April 18, 1961, full diplomatic relations at the level of an Apostolic Nunciature to the Sultanate of Oman and an Embassy to the Holy See “, announced the Vatican in a press release.
Located in the southeastern part of the Arabian Peninsula, Oman, a hydrocarbon-rich country surrounded by the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and Yemen, has around 4.5 million inhabitants, including many foreign workers. The announcement comes three months after a visit by Pope Francis to Bahrain, his second visit to the Gulf since his election in 2013 after that to the United Arab Emirates in 2019.
Oman, whose legislation is based on Sharia, thus becomes one of the approximately 180 States having official diplomatic relations with the Holy See, which does not maintain diplomatic ties, on the other hand with Saudi Arabia, the Afghanistan or North Korea.
The country has four Catholic parishes and 12 priests, the Vatican said in its statement. The birthplace of Islam, the Gulf has some 3.5 million Christians, of whom around 75% are Catholic, mostly migrant workers from the Philippines and India. Kuwait was the first country in the region to formalize its relations with the Vatican in 1968. Yemen did the same in 1998, Bahrain in 2000, Qatar in 2002 and the United Arab Emirates in 2007.
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(With AFP)