Easter in Asia Marked by Baptisms and Crucifixions

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.”

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.

After Cyprus, Euro Concerns Over Slovenia, a Former Euro Star

LONDON - Will Slovenia be the next Cyprus

So intense has been the speculation that the small Alpine state will be the next euro zone member to need a bailout that its top officials have been prompted to put out statements saying everything is fine.

“We will need no bailout this year,” Uros Cufer, the finance minister, said on Friday. “I am calm.”

That followed an assurance by Alenka Bratusek, the new prime minister, that Slovenia would not need international aid and was “capable of sorting things out itself.”

The statements were in response to a sharp rise this week in Slovenia’s potential borrowing costs as bond investors priced in the high risk of a default.

Analysts have been on the lookout for the next domino likely to fall since Cyprus was forced to accept the stringent conditions of its European partners for a €10-billion, or $12.8-billion, bailout last weekend.

My colleague Landon Thomas Jr. identified the risk in early February, when he wrote that Slovenia was one of two small euro zone economies, along with Malta, that should be causing international investors to lose sleep.

It has been a familiar tale of real estate bubble and bad property loans that have forced the government to prop up Slovenia’s struggling banking sector and other ailing companies.

The country’s banks are burdened with about €7 billion of bad loans, the equivalent of 20 percent of Slovenia’s gross domestic product.

The International Monetary Fund has said Slovenia will need to raise at least €3 billion this year to fund the budget, debt repayments and an overhaul of the banking sector. That will involve the state raising more money by June, when €1 billion of government debt comes up for renewal.

Slovenia, wedged between Italy, Austria, Hungary and Croatia, was described as the poster child of the new Europe when it joined the European Union in 2004, 13 years after declaring its independence from a disintegrating Yugoslavia.

Famed for its picture-postcard scenery, the high standard of living and education of its two million inhabitants, and its modern infrastructure, Slovenia was regarded at the time as the most promising of 10 new European Union entrants.

“As nation-states go, Slovenia is the equivalent of a quiet but comfortable middle-class suburb,” Samuel Loewenberg wrote for Slate.

From 2009, two years after it adopted the euro, the country entered a downturn marked by a stalled construction boom, a spate of ill-advised takeovers, and the accumulation of billions of euros of bad debts by the country’s banks.

“Slovenia’s fall from grace has cast doubt on an economic transition that was once the envy of Central and Eastern Europe,” my colleague Stephen Castle wrote from Ljubljana, the capital, last September.

Ms. Bratusek, whose center-left coalition government took office only on March 20, faces the prospect of the economy shrinking by two percent this year.

The government put off issuing more bonds on international markets as its borrowing rate tripled last week. Mr. Cufer said it could afford to wait.

“We do not have to go to the markets in these overheated times due to Cyprus,” Reuters quoted him as saying. “We can wait for the markets to calm down, for the investors to feel comfortable about our action and then we will tap the market.”

Slovenia could not be compared to Cyprus, he said. It was a view echoed by Petra Lesjak, a Ljubljana asset manager, in a Financial Times guest blog this week.

“Its banking sector - equal to about 130 percent of G.D.P. - is relatively small and its depositor base is mostly domestic or from within the E.U.,” she wrote.

“But the level of public debt is rising and a rescue of the banking sector could increase it to 59 percent of G.D.P. in 2013,” Ms. Lesjak added. “After years of delay and dithering, time is running out.”