BEIJING â€" If past years are anything to go by, thousands of Chinese were to be baptized Catholic on Easter Sunday, in a reflection of an increasingly intense search for spirituality in an officially atheist nation.
Last year, more than 22,000 Chinese were baptized on this most important day of the Christian calendar, according to Fides, a Catholic news agency, citing figures collected by the Study Center of Faith in Hebei Province, which borders Beijing.
China may have about 12 million Catholics, about half of whom attend the government’s “patriotic†church, the Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association, while the others follow the Pope, whom the Chinese state doesn’t recognize as head of the China’s Catholics, and worship in unofficial churches. Mainland China cut ties with the Vatican shortly after the 1949 Communist revolution but the Vatican has maintained diplomatic ties with Taiwan, the island to where the Chinese Nationalists fled, for more than seventy years.
Making for an even more complicated picture, on the Chinese mainland, many Catholics, including priests, “look both ways,†listening to the state church and to the Pope.
The numbers of Chinese being baptized on Easter Sunday appears to be growing, according to reports by Catholic organizations such as this one in 2010 on Clerical Whispers, a blog, and another report from 2008, also by Fides, which said nearly 14,000 people were baptized that year.
But as every year, high drama was supplied this Easter weekend by the Philippines, where real crucifixions took place on Good Friday in villages and towns in Pampanga Province, north of the capital, Manila, in gory re-enactments of the biblical story of Jesus’s death. The Philippines is Asia’s biggest Catholic-majority nation.
Volunteers had five-inch nails driven through their hands and feet, according to media reports, before being hung up on crosses. The health authorities called on them to make sure they had tetanus shots to prevent infection and to only use stainless steel nails, UCA News, a Catholic news agency, reported. As usual the dramatic and painful events drew a crowd, about 50,000 this year, according to media reports.
On Twitter, some expressed astonishment:
The bloody ritual has been carried out in the Philippines every Easter since 1955, the Philippine Star reported. About 2,000 flagellants also took part in the Good Friday dramas, using bamboo sticks to beat themselves as they walked a mock “via Crucis,†or Stations of the Cross, the newspaper wrote.
The Philippine Star wrote that one man, a house painter, Ruben Enaje, has been crucified every year for the last 27 years, “as an act of penitential thanksgiving†after surviving a fall from a scaffolding, it said.
The church does not approve of the crucifixions, calling them “folk religion,†as The Christian Post reported on Saturday.
“The ritual started in the province about six decades ago as a form of religious vow by poor people seeking forgiveness, a cure for illness and the fulfillment of other wishes,†it wrote. But the church says it can’t stop it.
“We are in no position to suppress them,†The Christian Post quoted an auxiliary bishop, Pablo Virgilio David, as saying. “I do not think it is right to close our doors to them just because they are more attracted to these folk practices than to our Roman liturgy which they may find too foreign or cerebral.â€
Archbishop Jose Palma of Cebu, president of the Philippine Bishops’ Conference, said that the real spirit of the observance of the Holy Week is “conversion of oneself. Let us concentrate more on the prayers. These are the wonderful ways of celebrating the Holy Week,†The Christian Post wrote, citing Catholic Herald.
And Bishop Joel Baylon of Legazpi, chairman of the bishops’ commission on youth, said there are “other forms of sacrifice and suffering that would lead to real conversion.†“The Lord appreciates all these forms of sacrifices, but sometimes the kind of sacrifice that we impose on ourselves is not what the Lord wants us to do,†he said.
