Pope Francis visited East Timor earlier this week and many people came out to see him:

opes are popular. So much so that nearly half the population of East Timor gathered Tuesday in a seaside park for Pope Francis’ final Mass in the small Southeast Asian country whose people are deeply Catholic…

East Timor, also known as Timor-Leste, has been overwhelmingly Catholic ever since Portuguese explorers first arrived in the early 1500s and some 97% of the population today is Catholic. They turned out in droves to welcome the first pope to visit them since their independence in 2002, on the same field where St. John Paul II prayed in 1989 during the nation’s fight to separate from Indonesia.

Here is how this crowd compares to other crowds for papal visits:

Other papal Masses have drawn millions of people in more populous countries, such as the Philippines, Brazil and Poland. But the estimated crowd of 600,000 people in East Timor was believed to represent the biggest turnout for a papal event ever in terms of the proportion of the population…

While the East Timor gathering stands out, experts caution against relying on crowd counts that cannot be independently verified. The Vatican communicates crowd estimates that come from local organizers — who have an interest in overestimating the popularity of the head of the Roman Catholic Church.

Crowd counting can be a tricky process. Does it get more difficult if it is a religious crowd as opposed to another kind of crowd?

More broadly, is the experience of a religious large crowd different? It is a unique experience to be crowds of hundreds of thousands of people or more. It does not happen often. The crowd can have a collective experience that is hard for individuals to have on their own. Such a crowd can help produce change or sentiment.