Sacred Heart Church, Manama: the oldest Catholic church still standing in the Gulf, built on land granted by Bahrain’s own ruler

On Isa Al Kabeer Avenue, in the heart of Manama, the capital of Bahrain, the Sacred Heart Church is held to be the oldest Catholic church still functioning in the Persian Gulf, with the sole exception of Yemen, which faces a different sea, the Gulf of Aden, where the Catholic presence goes back decades earlier. Between January 1938 and early 1939, Monsignor Giovanni Battista Tirinanzi, apostolic vicar of Arabia based in Aden, went to Manama to ask for land on which to build a church. The land was granted, according to most sources, by Sheikh Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa, then ruler of Bahrain, though an alternative source attributes the grant to Crown Prince Salman bin Hamad Al Khalifa, not yet ruler in those years: a point not fully settled among the sources. The foundation stone was laid on 9 June 1939 under the supervision of Father Luigi Magliacani, a Capuchin, and in about six months the church, the priests’ residence and the Sacred Heart school were completed. The first mass was celebrated on Christmas Eve 1939, with the bells rung around eleven at night, and the official blessing of the building followed on 3 March 1940, though one isolated source gives 8 March. The building visible today, however, is not the one from 1939: the church was rebuilt and enlarged in 1990, under Father Felicio Diniz, to mark the fiftieth anniversary of its founding. In the following decades the St. Barth’s hall (1957-58, predating the reconstruction), the community centre (1996), the Third Millennium building (2000), and the renewal of the altar (2012) and of the adoration chapel (2013, for the seventy-fifth anniversary) were added. Known as the “mother church” of the apostolic vicariate of Northern Arabia, which today covers Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar and Saudi Arabia, the parish serves a community the parish itself estimates at around 140,000 faithful, among them Indians from Kerala and Goa, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, Filipinos, Sri Lankans and Arabs, with masses celebrated in about ten different languages. On 8 November 2025, coinciding with the eighty-fifth anniversary of its founding, Bishop Aldo Berardi, apostolic vicar of Northern Arabia, raised the church to a vicarial shrine of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, by decree effective from 1 November. The church remains, together with the more recent cathedral of Our Lady of Arabia in Awali, opened in 2021, one of only two Catholic churches existing in the Kingdom of Bahrain.