February 3, 2019

ABU DHABI, United Arab Emirates — Pope Francis became the first pontiff to visit the Arabian Peninsula, the birthplace of Islam, as he arrived on Sunday in the United Arab Emirates on a trip seeking to improve relations with the Muslim world and to offer encouragement to Catholic migrants in a region where his flock has dwindled amid increasing persecution and bloodshed.

The three-day stay in the Emirates, a relatively tolerant oasis that is home to some one million Catholics, also comes as a brief reprieve for a pope whose legacy and moral authority have been challenged by his struggle to come to grips with a global sex abuse scandal that shows no signs of abating.

Those troubles seemed far away as the pope’s plane touched down amid the palm trees, opulent high-rises, men in white dishdashas and enormous mosques in Abu Dhabi. While the tension in some of the pope’s recent travels has been around what sort of apology he might issue for the Church’s misdeeds, his emphasis on this trip will be interreligious dialogue and improving the situation of Roman Catholics, both in this oil-rich nation that has promoted religious inclusion and throughout the less tolerant, and more dangerous, region.

Read more:

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/03/world/middleeast/pope-francis-uae-mideast-muslims.html