Pope Francis said Mass for thousands of Roman Catholics in Bahrain this morning, thrilling members of the foreign Catholic community from around the Gulf.
The crowd of about 30,000 people filled Bahrain's National Stadium.
"This is a miracle," said Mary Grace Fortes, 36, a Filipino who works at the reception of a hotel in Bahrain. "So important for us."
Like many Filipino women who work outside their country, Fortes is married and sends money back home to help support her family, including her husband and 16-year-old son.
Hundreds of Catholic foreign workers were bussed in over the 25-km (16 mile) King Fahd Causeway that links Bahrain with Saudi Arabia, too.
"The Bahrainis arranged everything perfectly for us," said Jos Chazoor, 53, who is from Kerala in India and works as a manager for a medical equipment company in Saudi Arabia.
Chazoor's 75-year-old mother was too overcome with emotion to respond to a reporter's questions just before the pope arrived in the packed stadium to an enthusiastic welcome by faithful waving yellow-and-white Vatican flags.
"She is too thrilled to talk," said Chazoor, who drives with his mother over the causeway from Saudi Arabia regularly to attend Mass in one of Bahrain's two RC places of worship - a church and a new cathedral - which provide pastoral care for the some 160,000 Catholics in Bahrain.
In his homily, Francis praised. Bahrain's open policy towards people of all faiths.
"This very land is a living image of coexistence in diversity, and indeed an image of our world, increasingly marked by the constant migration of peoples and by a pluralism of ideas, customs and traditions," he said.
Foreign workers, many of them from Asia, provide the backbone of Gulf economies, working in sectors such as construction, hospitality, transport and oil and gas.
Francis urged the faithful to be kind, saying this was key to the Gospel message of loving your enemies.
He said they should always be "persevering in good even when evil is done to us, breaking the spiral of vengeance, disarming violence, demilitarising the heart".
As Francis was driven on a open popemobile through the crowd on the stadium's pitch just before the start of the Mass, a speaker on the altar platform shouted "God bless the pope, God bless the royal family."
A Bahrain government spokesperson said 111 nationalities attended the Mass.
The prayers of the faithful during the Mass were read in languages spoken by foreign workers including English, Tagalog, Swahili, Malayalam, Tamil and Konkani.
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