In 2008 when the last official figure came out, there are 350,000 Catholics , mostly from the Philippines and India who lives in Kuwait as immigrant workers. And the flow of these immigrants in Saud Arabia and the Gulf is so massive that Rome is studying how to redraw the boundaries of the vicariates in that area, which today is still a huge vicariate of Arabia, comprising Saudi Arabia, Oman, Yemen, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, and Bahrain.
In Israel, the rise of Jewish Catholics, formerly unthought of, occurred and the community now counts to about 500 Catholics. And this community is growing as children of immigrant workers from the Philippines and the Sudan attend Hebrew schools, learning the Hebrew language of their foreign-born parents' churches. They attend Mass in Hebrew in seven Hebrew Catholic chapels under the Jesuit priest Father David Neuhaus, who works directly under the Latin-rite Patriach of Jerusalem, Fouad Twal. Those who came from the Philippines numbered some 40,000, mostly Catholic women. Their children, born and baptized in Israel, go to school, learn Hebrew, and assimilate into Israeli society.
This phenomenon is a result of the founding of the Apostolate of Saint James the Apostle, approved by the Patriarch Alberto Gori on 11 February 1955, to address pastoral needs of Hebrew-speaking Catholics, Jews and non-Jews alike. In 2003, the Holy See appointed as head of the vicariate of Jerusalem for Hebrew-speaking Catholics a bishop and Benedictine monk of great ability named Jean Baptiste Gourion. He is Algerian by birth and himself a convert from Judaism. When he died, he got succeeded by priets, Neuhaus being one of them.
