Apostolic Vicar of Gulf: let's listen to lay faithful!

Women religious and lay people this week addressed the assembly of Bishops gathered in the Vatican for the Synod for Middle Eastern Churches. Speaking at a Vatican press briefing Tuesday, the Apostolic Vicar in the Arabian Peninsula, Bishop Paul Hinder spoke of the importance he gives to the voice of women and laity in a region where churches are struggling to meet the needs of vast numbers of incoming Christian migrant workers from Asia and Africa.

He stressed that without the help of lay people in the Gulf, his churches in Arabia would have to close their doors. “Thousands of men and women (are) sharing our responsibility in catechism, in the organization of the daily and weekly ongoing of the church activities,” he explains, pointing out that more than two million Filipino Catholics alone are part of his vicariate and masses on some Sundays in one parish can exceed 40,000 faithful.

Legal restrictions in the Gulf have limited the number of churches that can be built and the number of Catholic clergy allowed into the countries there.

He suggested that his fellow Bishops at the Synod might do well to listen more attentively to the concerns and expectations of the lay faithful back home. “There is sometimes the risk that we bishops, we are so concerned about the structure, the question about the jurisdiction of the sacramental service, of our obligations, that we do not always sufficiently realize what are the needs and the expectations of the people.”

During the synod discussions, some bishops have pointed to the need for maintaining the different liturgical traditions, patrimony and rites of the Eastern Churches, especially in the diaspora where the faithful of Middle Eastern origin are farther from their roots.

Bishop Hinder agrees this is “a very important issue.” But, he returns to the concerns of the faithful in his region of the Arabian Peninsula: “they are not so much interested about the details of the Church; they have to struggle ..to maintain their faith, how to work together if they’re Melkites or Latins or Syro-Malabar or Maronite and so on.”

Bishop Hinder recalls a recent meeting with Arabic speaking Christians from different traditions who asked him “to fight” at the Synod “because we know that our bishops, they would like to establish for each (eastern rite) their own structures. We can’t have that here in the Gulf,” they told him.

Hinder explains the lack of churches and clergy in the Gulf means that people from different Catholic rites collaborate together and celebrate mass together as one big family. “One Sunday it might be a Maronite mass,” he explains “another Sunday, a Melkite mass; another Sunday the Latin mass according to the possibilities they have.”

Bishop Hinder spoke of the importance of hearing the voices of women and laity at the Synod:
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