Dubai: Tens of thousands of Christians gathered in churches across the UAE on Sunday to celebrate Easter, a day that many mark as the most important occasion of the year.
At sunrise, the faithful trickled into the five-decade-old St. Mary’s Catholic Church in Dubai to attend the first mass of the day.
In between the morning mass at 11am and the afternoon mass at 3pm, a long line of worshippers — many of them Indian or Filipino — stretched into the church’s cavernous, cross-shaped main hall.
They were there to receive a blessing from one of the parish’s 10 priests.
Meanwhile, on the dozens of wooden pews, some knelt or sat in reflection and silent prayer.
Other believers sat outside in the shaded church yard.
“It’s my fourteenth Easter in Dubai,” said Kingsley, a towering Nigerian expat who was reading a small yellow Bible. “I always come to this place.”
But this year, there’s no time to stay for the mass — he has to leave soon to begin his afternoon shift as a security guard.
Others wait while devout family members line up to receive the blessing.
“Here, especially in St. Mary’s, you need to wait outside,” said John Terence, a 14-year-old schoolboy who points at the long line going into the church hall.
“My family and me came here two hours earlier to get a place in the church. And it’s a happy occasion here, people from different communities come here and enjoy the services.”
Decade-long vision
Over the years, there have been a steady increase in the number of worshippers at St. Mary’s on Easter, noted Joseph Vijay, who came to the church with his wife and daughter. This year is his tenth in Dubai.
“On Christmas and Easter, you can expect more people. Because that’s one occasion when many people feel they need to be in church,” the Indian expat said.
Many longtime church-goers noted an unusually large security presence this Easter.
At St Mary’s, police had cordoned off the car park. Nearby, at a makeshift shaded checkpoint, security guards asked to check inside handbags.
Two days earlier, during Friday services at the Jebel Ali Church Compound, which also houses the country’s sole Sikh temple, police set up similar checkpoints.
Some believe that the tougher measures are a response to last week’s bombings on Palm Sunday at two Coptic churches in Egypt, which killed at least 45 people.
Convenient church
St. Mary’s does not keep count of the number of worshippers who pass through its gates. But the parish priest, Father Lennie Connully, told Gulf News earlier that he was expecting more than 100,000 people to attend over the week.
In total, nine masses will be held throughout Easter day at St. Mary’s, including one Arabic mass in the evening.
And it’s not just Catholics who gather at St. Mary’s throughout the day.
One Greek Orthodox Christian who had just come to pray said that she was visiting because the church was close to her place of work.
“The most important thing is to come to church,” said Christine Daher, a Cypriot expat. “It’s Easter, and it’s something very important for us in our religion.”
With a smile, she added: “Whether Catholic or Orthodox, we as Christians all worship the same God.”
What is Easter?
For hundreds of millions of Christians around the world, Easter marks the resurrection of Jesus from the dead.
For Catholics and Orthodox Christians, who make up the first and second largest Christian denominations, Easter is the final, most important day of Holy Week, which marks Christ’s final week on earth.
The week is usually spent with special prayers, fasting and devotion.
This year, during an Easter Vigil at the Vatican City the night before, Pope Francis urged the faithful not to ignore the plight of refugees, the poor, and the vulnerable. The leader of the world’s 1.2 billion Catholics also criticised “paralysing and barren bureaucracies that stand in the way of change.”
