Easter Week Around the World (and Hell, if It Exists)

For Christians around the world, Easter is a revered religious holiday: a deep mediation on the Crucifixion and Resurrection of Christ.

From South Africa to India to Israel to Indonesia, the faithful held solemn ceremonies and processions, re-enacted Christ’s suffering on the cross and prayed for loved ones.

The Holy Week leading up to Easter Sunday — also called Pascha and Resurrection Sunday — took various forms.

Before Easter celebrations, a church in Colombia donated 250,000 wafers to Venezuela’s Catholic Church, which has struggled to buy its own because a shortage of flour, according to news reports.

“It is important to attend to the needs that afflict the faith as a result of this time of border crisis,” according to a statement from the diocese, in the city of Cúcuta. “At this time of the week, the central mysteries of the Christian faith can be celebrated.”

The BBC said the wafers were handed over on a bridge between the two countries.

Good Friday celebrations in the parish of Saiqi, China, went on with a conspicuous absence: the worshippers’ bishop had been whisked away by the government a day earlier.

Bishop Guo Xijin, 59, of the Mindong diocese in central-eastern China, has been at the center of a tug of war between the Holy See and the Chinese authorities over who can appoint bishops in China and how to unite the country’s Catholics. He was detained Monday after refusing to celebrate the Easter Mass with a government-approved bishop. But he was allowed to return home Wednesday.

At a pre-dawn Mass on Thursday, the bishop urged congregants at the Saiqi church to be brave and keep the faith. “Full of comfort and hope, we are inspired to more bravely face struggles and offer our love to God,” he told them.

Not long after, government agents took him away for what they described as a “vacation” — a euphemism in China for an enforced disappearance, according to The Associated Press.

On Holy Thursday, Pope Francis washed the feet of prisoners at an all-male prison in Rome, Regina Coeli — including two Muslims, an Orthodox Christian and a Buddhist. “Everyone always has the opportunity to change life and one cannot judge,” Francis told the prisoners.

It was the fourth time in his five-year papacy that Francis has celebrated Mass in an Italian jail. But it took place alongside an eye-popping controversy, after the Rome newspaper La Repubblica quoted the pope as saying “A hell does not exist.”

Eugenio Scalfari, 93, one of the newspaper’s founders, said Francis had told him that bad souls are "not punished," and that the souls of repentant sinners “obtain God’s forgiveness and take their place among the ranks of those who contemplate him, but those who do not repent and cannot be forgiven disappear,” according to one translation.

The reported remarks were seized upon by the pope’s conservative critics, and the Vatican scrambled to tamp down the brewing controversy, issuing a statement that said the conversation had been private and that the article should not be “considered a faithful transcription of the Holy Father’s words.”

Scalfari is known for not taking notes and for reconstructing lengthy conversations with prominent figures from memory. An outspoken atheist, he has been granted several interviews by Francis, many of them followed by Vatican objections.

The Paixão do Cristo (Passion of Christ) is a theatrical production in Pernambuco, Brazil, that is based on the life of Christ and is considered to be the largest open-air theater in the world.

The play runs for one week during Easter and is watched by about 6,000 to 10,000 people each night.

At a traditional Easter church service at St. George’s Chapel in Windsor, England, Queen Elizabeth II gave out purses containing commemorative coins to mark Maundy Thursday, when almsgiving and washing of feet traditionally start the celebrations for Easter.

In a televised message on Good Friday, Prince Charles spoke of the persecution of Christians around the world and said he had been “deeply moved” by those who had the courage to forgive their tormentors.

In Durban, South Africa, priests and nuns silently marched through the streets with wooden crosses on their shoulders on Good Friday, and throngs placed flowers on a wooden cross.

In Nairobi, Kenya, many Christians spent Good Friday fasting or in prayer, repentance and meditation on the agony and suffering of Christ.

In Ethiopia, Easter is generally celebrated after 55 days of fasting, with followers of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church offering daily prayers at the church and tending not to eat until 3 p.m., except on Saturday and Sunday, when prayers are conducted early in the morning.

Villages and towns in Spain celebrated Semana Santa, or Holy Week, in their own way. In Verges, a village in Catalonia near the Costa Brava, the faithful wore skull masks and skeleton outfits while carrying scythes, ashes and clocks to perform an ancient “dance of death” to the beat of drums.

The tradition is said to symbolize the final judgment after death to decide if a soul goes to heaven, to purgatory to hell.

Others took part in flamboyant parades or extravagant penitents’ processions, carrying crosses on their backs to commemorate Jesus’ suffering.

Roman Catholic devotees wearing crowns of twigs, including a woman, were nailed to wooden crosses by Filipinos dressed as Roman centurions in a Good Friday re-enactment of Jesus Christ’s sufferings.

The ritual in the village of San Pedro Cutud merged church traditions with folk practices in which penitents attempt to atone for sins, pray for the sick or a better life, or give thanks for what they believe were miracles.

The spectacle was watched by thousands of spectators but frowned upon by church leaders in the Philippines, Asia’s largest Roman Catholic nation. Archbishop Socrates Villegas said in a statement: “Instead of spilling your blood on the streets, why not walk into a Red Cross office and donate blood? Choose to share life. Share your blood.”

In Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim nation, an estimated 6,000 Catholic pilgrims visited Larantuka — near Kupang in Flores, at the far east of the archipelago — for ceremonies around Holy Week.

The festival there is centered on the legend of three religious statues that reportedly washed up on the shores in the 1500s.

Locals pray for deceased relatives, there are religious processions by boat and on the streets, and worshippers crawl from the entrance of a church toward an altar where they pay homage to a shrine of religious relics, among other ceremonies.

In Ireland, the holiday this year marked the advent of a new law.

For almost a century, selling alcohol in Ireland on Good Friday had been banned — a legacy of the country’s deeply rooted Christian traditions. But after the Parliament passed new legislation in January, pubs in Ireland lifted the ban on alcohol for Good Friday.

The move is seen as a boon for tourists and for businesses. It could generate as much as 40 million euros ($49 million) in sales.

“The Good Friday ban is from a different era,” Padraig Cribben, chief executive of the Vintners’ Federation of Ireland, told the BBC. “Like all other businesses who were never subject to a ban, publicans now have a choice to open.”