The visitor to the great cities of the Persian Gulf understands a little of what it must have been like to come from the provinces to Rome at the height of her power. Western cities in the late liberal-democratic era have a touch of the shoddy, the grimy—even in their monumental districts. But in the Gulf, the fantasy and pretense of Las Vegas become solid fact. Within these geometric marvels, these buildings shaped like waves, rock formations, or the heads of hooded falcons, everything is real. Thirty-foot arches of black marble, huge crystal chandeliers over opus sectile floors, high doors of brass or solid lacquered wood—there are no fakes.

This is the desert, but breezes from the Gulf keep the air from becoming harsh. Not that you need to spend much time in the untreated atmosphere if you don’t want to; powerful air conditioning units are the characteristic appliance of this place. The sidewalks in the tourist districts are cooled through vents in the pavement. Burton praises Arabia’s “diaphanous skies, in air glorious as aether, whose every breath raises men’s spirits like sparkling wine,” and maybe there’s something to that—you feel you need less sleep here—but in the Year of Our Lord 2025, you can take it all in at a perfectly maintained sixty-eight degrees Fahrenheit, a good twenty degrees below the autumnal daytime temperature.

This was once the backwater of the world, these cities redoubts for pirates, pearl divers, and long-distance merchants. That changed with the British, seeking ever-greater security for the sea lanes connecting Europe to India. Burton and Lorimer geographized the once-mythic sands of Araby, dragging it from the world of medieval legend into the realm of history, of maps and mineral surveys. Pirates and the odd Turkish garrison were cleared out; the local tribes were pacified or co-opted.

The British did not endure, but Araby did. These lands of fantasy are now sustained by two pillars: oil and foreign labor. The mass migration that so disrupts Western public life is peanuts next to what goes on in the Gulf. One Gulf nation only, Oman, has a majority-citizen population: fifty-six percent. The rest fall off pretty quickly. Bahrain: forty-six percent. Kuwait: thirty percent. The United Arab Emirates: eleven percent. Qatar: also eleven percent. The foreign labor that makes up the rest of the population, which is a real cause of beady-eyed concern among these countries, hails from the heterogeneous “Global South,” which is the genteel replacement for the now-antiquated term “Third World.” These people come primarily from South Asia and the Philippines; the occasional eruptions of bad P.R. for the Gulf over the maltreatment of workers do not seem to slow the influx.

The religious composition of the worker populations is a mixture. Both Muslims and Catholics come from the Philippines; Hindus, Muslims, and Christians from India. A disproportionate number of the Indians are from the state of Kerala, which was left with an ironic situation after decades of communist rule: a very high level of educational attainment and a very low number of jobs. The result is a steady export of talent to markets abroad. Kerala has a large Muslim population but is also disproportionately Christian—about eighteen percent locally to less than five percent of India as a whole. In the smaller Gulf nations, Christians make up between twelve and eighteen percent of the population.

The Gulf countries all have religious liberty, in a sense. Non-Muslims are formally allowed, with the permission of the government, to practice their respective cults publicly and without the harassment of the authorities. This is not exactly the kind of stuff that typically gets Western liberals cheering. Missionary activity is discouraged or outright banned, and the government issues licenses to churches and temples. The priests are largely drawn from the orders that have always taken an interest in the East: the Carmelites and the Capuchins. The current apostolic vicar of Northern Arabia, the jurisdiction that covers the greater part of the Gulf, is one of the world’s handful of Trinitarians, an order of friars founded for the practical work of ransoming Christian captives during the Crusades.

In Doha, where I found myself in October, the Christian churches are clustered in a walled compound on the edge of the main urban mass, past vacant lots marked down for future residential development. (This is a fairly typical arrangement in the Gulf.) Here, the horizon looks smudged. I pass through a guard house with a metal detector under the tough but friendly gaze of a few armed Ethiopians; they ask where I’m going, but they don’t seem too worried about a Westerner in a linen jacket kicking up a ruckus.

The churches of a dozen different traditions crowd together within the walls and gates; Anglicans and Syriacs pass each other on the dusty pavement. There is nothing special about the spot where this little ecclesiastical town sits: no miracles, no shrines, no resting place of a great saint. Its sole recommendation is that it is far away from the rest of the city. The simple fact is that the Faith is not ancient here. There have never been many Christians this far afield, and the ones who did end up here in antiquity were mostly Nestorians. Christianity is an interloper.

The compound’s Catholic church is unprepossessing: collegiate brutalist, the color of sand. The parish is divided into over a dozen different language communities and notionally serves a six-figure population of Catholics. A walk-through display for one of the jubilees that Rome now incessantly decrees (“the Jubilee of Hope”) has pictures of Pope Leo and the late Pope Francis printed a jot too large for their resolution.

Nor is the church more auspicious on the inside. It is a monument of Post-Conciliar Eclectic. The sheetrock walls are covered with amateur murals depicting the Mysteries of the Rosary; a mosaic in modern style dominates the sanctuary; the stained glass windows are neo-Gothic and, incongruously, rather good. Stations of the Cross are Eastern iconesque; saints’ statues are in the nineteenth-century, Italianate sentimentalizing idiom. A giant light-up rosary hangs next to the sanctuary. The folding theater-style seating on the balcony level completes the pastiche. It all feels little different from the poorer sort of American suburban parish. A brass plaque in the narthex commemorates an emir’s presence at the church’s dedication.

Up in the sanctuary, Father is conducting a wedding. The bride and groom are Filipinos, and Father’s homily—the usual stuff for a wedding homily—is delivered in alternating English and Tagalog. The girls all wear those pastel dresses with puffy sleeves that Filipina girls wear. The church is decorated with hope lilies and ribbons. The hymns are accompanied by an electric keyboard with tinny, whooshing orchestral effects. Father seems unsurprised when I pop up in line for Communion. In Qatar, as in many Muslim countries, the weekend is Friday and Saturday; the binding Masses have been moved to those days to accommodate workers’ schedules. I’ll be on the plane most of Sunday, so I figure this is my best chance to fulfill the obligation.

I corner the priest in the parish office. Father is friendly, but all business: He has another wedding to do in half an hour. He doesn’t even bother taking off his vestments. He says he does three or four weddings every weekend, sometimes more. He will meet my eye, but he won’t quite face me head-on; he is, if not quite suspicious, circumspect about an American who is spending his Saturday crashing weddings. Are there vocations? Yes, occasionally. He himself had been a migrant worker elsewhere in the Gulf. Do the different language communities mix much? No, hardly at all. “We do everything we can with the space”—catechism classes, sacrament preparation, support for the poor, and many Masses in many languages. The era of the vernacular means that unity even in worship is attenuated, at best.

As I leave the compound, I notice that a lot of the other churches are much prettier than the Catholic church, although none are comparable to the glories of the city mosques. What is the point of all this? Here in some way, the post-conciliar dream has been realized; things have been cut down to the essentials. We are back in pagan Rome: a young Church made up of strangers, without wealth, power, or even at this point much by way of tradition; a governing order that is, on a good day, cautiously indifferent. Deprived of Her pomps and Her sentimental attachments to landscape and history, the Church must stand on Her own claims—that the imposter Jesus Christ rose from the dead and founded a particular Church that is the guardian of particular truths. She must do this without anything recognizable as aesthetic good taste or institutional power. Waugh’s “beaten-copper lamp of deplorable design” stands against the impossible, luminous geometries of global capital and the ziggurats devoted to the simplest, most hypnotic creed in world history, that there is no god but God and Mahomet is his prophet, recited in glowing edifices whence the heartbreaking call to prayer echoes five times a day.

Do you believe the meek will inherit the earth? Maybe, but certainly not on anything like a human timescale. I certainly will never see it. This is the challenge of the Gulf, I suppose: to look an order of fourteen centuries in the eye, to hear its songs unchanged in language from the time of Uthman, to see its modern success and say, No. To challenge it, you have dimpled sheetrock, a secondhand Yamaha electric keyboard, and the Gather hymnal, along with the report of a report of a miracle that happened two thousand years ago. It’s a hard thing. I am glad that sort of bravery is not asked of me on a regular basis.

As I drive back toward the city, looking at the cheerful skyline and the remarkable smudge of the horizon—really, it’s as if God’s own thumb were dragged through wet paint at the edge of sand and sky—I wonder. “The gates of Hell shall not prevail” is not much of a promise, is it? It’s not a guarantee of worldly victory in any way; it is a bare statement that some Catholics somewhere will hold onto the Faith until the show is wrapped up. It’s not a guarantee that the Church will be especially elegant, or cultured, or intellectually robust, let alone powerful or influential. It’s just a guarantee that somewhere out in the desert you can touch God. For the foreseeable future—perhaps this has always been the case—we must learn that this is enough.