A Catholic university makes room for Muslims

From The Minneapolis Star Tribune:

Dark-haired young men started arriving about 12:30 p.m., piling their backpacks and coats in the narrow hallway. One by one, they slipped off their shoes and darted into an “ablution station” for ritual washing. Then they filed silently into room 302 of Loras Hall.

For the first time in its 128-year history, the University of St. Thomas has its own Islamic prayer rooms, as well as ritual washing stations for observant Muslims.

The prayer rooms, which opened in September, reflect the surging number of students from Middle Eastern countries flocking to the Catholic university in St. Paul.

The contingent from Saudi Arabia alone has jumped tenfold, from 12 students in 2008 to 121 this fall, and officials say they’re now the largest bloc of foreign students at the university.

“Yes, we are a Catholic school,” said Karen Lange, the dean of students, “but I think this shows that we’re also a diverse place, and we’re welcoming of students from all faiths.”

The symbols of the university’s Catholic heritage are everywhere on the St. Paul campus: in the chapels, in the artwork, in the St. Paul Seminary divinity school.

Yet they came as a surprise to some of the newcomers.

“We didn’t know this was a Catholic university when we came here,” admitted Afnan Alowayyid, a business communication major, who came from Saudi Arabia with her husband. Her English was so rudimentary, she says now, that she didn’t realize that the school was named after a Catholic saint.

“The name didn’t mean anything to me,” she said.

It was also her first exposure to churches, crosses and images of the Virgin Mary. Growing up in Mecca, the capital of the Muslim world, she was never “exposed to any other religion before,” she said.

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