Handwritten Bible that weighs 22kg
2,000 selected parishioners achieve the feat
Copy of the holy book presented to pope now on display at St Mary’s Church in Dubai |
Do you know that the biggest handwritten community Bible in the world is here in Dubai?
In April 2017, Dubai’s St Mary’s Church, one of the largest Roman Catholic parishes in the world, celebrated its golden jubilee.
The parish brainstormed for extraordinary ideas to celebrate. While talking to Gulf News, the church’s parish priest, Fr Lennie JA Connully recalled the meeting that took place in November 2016: “Some people came up with the idea, why don’t we write the Bible in all the languages existing in this parish. It was a bright but challenging task. We invited people, and people speaking 52 languages came forward. The next task was to collect 52 Bibles in various languages.”
Mathew Thomas, one of the organisers said: “The church has around 300,000 parish members who are involved in church activities. When we announced, many registrations came through from various nationalities.”
Volunteering wasn’t enough, the writers who would be selected, needed to have good penmanship.
Finally, on the afternoon of March 31, 2017, nearly 2,000 selected parishioners gathered to achieve the feat. Thomas said: “The parishioners got together in some classrooms and halls of the St. Mary’s Catholic High School in Oud Metha.”
Passages from the Bible were allotted based on the strength of each group per language. In around two hours, the writing was over.
But the challenging part was yet to come.
Fr Connully said: “The next task was to arrange the pages, collecting the papers, putting them in the right places and so on. The arrangement took almost a month.”