More than 260 million Orthodox Christians yesterday celebrated Easter Sunday, with church leaders asking worshipers to stay at home to avoid spreading COVID-19.
Orthodox Christians, the world’s third-largest group of Christian believers, this year celebrate Easter a week after Catholics and Protestants because they follow a different calendar.
Last week’s Easter celebrations took place in empty churches while Pope Francis livestreamed his traditional message from the Vatican, as the pandemic that has killed more than 160,000 made massed worship too risky.
Photo: Reuters
Most Orthodox Christians would also skip traditional midnight services, even though Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union where most live have relatively low numbers of confirmed cases of the virus so far.
Moscow’s Patriarch Kirill, who leads 150 million believers, has urged the faithful to pray at home and not go to church until he gives his blessing.
Russian President Vladimir Putin was dropping his usual attendance at an Easter service and planned to go to a chapel in the grounds of his residence outside Moscow.
Photo: EPA-EFE
In Moscow and the surrounding region, where most Russian COVID-19 cases are concentrated, churches were to hold services behind closed doors with broadcasts online or on television.
However, churches were to remain open in many regions of the country, which has reported more than 42,850 cases of coronavirus and more than 360 deaths. Church officials asked worshippers to keep their distance, wear masks and not kiss icons.
In much of the wider Orthodox region, churches were not open to the public.
The Istanbul-based Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople announced that services would be closed to the public and broadcast online.
The same decision was taken in Cyprus, Greece, Serbia and North Macedonia, as well as in Egypt, where Orthodox Coptic Christians comprise 10 to 15 percent of the population.
Jerusalem’s Old City is normally packed for Orthodox Easter, but was almost deserted over the weekend due to Israel’s strict lockdown measures.
The annual Holy Fire ceremony took place on Saturday behind closed doors in the city’s Church of the Holy Sepulchre.
A small group of clerics at the church celebrated the ancient ceremony, which normally draws enormous crowds as a flame is transferred to faithful around the globe from within a chamber where Christians believe Jesus was buried and rose from the dead.
In Romania, while churches had closed their doors, volunteers and priests planned to go to people’s homes handing out loaves of consecrated bread and sharing the holy flame, a compromise that angered some people.
“If we can go to a pharmacy to get medicines for our body, why can’t we go to church for our spiritual medicine?” asked Monica Georgescu, an Orthodox Christian in her 70s who lives in Bucharest and says she has not missed an Easter service since childhood.
A number of Orthodox churches have opposed the imposition of lockdown measures.
In Bulgaria, the Orthodox Church insisted services would be open to all, but worshipers were required to wear masks and stand at a minimum distance from each other.
In Georgia, which has 394 confirmed cases, the government bowed to pressure from religious authorities and allowed services in the largest churches despite a public lockdown, while no senior officials were to attend.
Ukraine saw a similar divergence of views with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky urging people to stay at home and linking a surge in infections to last week’s Catholic celebrations, while the Orthodox Church encouraged worshipers to gather in the open-air.
In Belarus, a country of 9 million with a relatively high number of cases, the situation was reversed.
Belarusian Church leader Metropolitan Pavel urged believers to stay at home, saying: “Ritual is secondary while human life is much more valuable.”
However, Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko — who regularly casts doubt on the pandemic — insisted that he would attend an Easter service, saying: “I will be in church. It is my tradition.”
Archeologists in Peru on Thursday said they found the 5,000-year-old remains of a noblewoman at the sacred city of Caral, revealing the important role played by women in the oldest center of civilization in the Americas. “What has been discovered corresponds to a woman who apparently had elevated status, an elite woman,” archeologist David Palomino said. The mummy was found in Aspero, a sacred site within the city of Caral that was a garbage dump for more than 30 years until becoming an archeological site in the 1990s. Palomino said the carefully preserved remains, dating to 3,000BC, contained skin, part of the
TRUMP EFFECT: The win capped one of the most dramatic turnarounds in Canadian political history after the Conservatives had led the Liberals by more than 20 points Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney yesterday pledged to win US President Donald Trump’s trade war after winning Canada’s election and leading his Liberal Party to another term in power. Following a campaign dominated by Trump’s tariffs and annexation threats, Carney promised to chart “a new path forward” in a world “fundamentally changed” by a US that is newly hostile to free trade. “We are over the shock of the American betrayal, but we should never forget the lessons,” said Carney, who led the central banks of Canada and the UK before entering politics earlier this year. “We will win this trade war and
‘BODIES EVERYWHERE’: The incident occurred at a Filipino festival celebrating an anti-colonial leader, with the driver described as a ‘lone suspect’ known to police Canadian police arrested a man on Saturday after a car plowed into a street party in the western Canadian city of Vancouver, killing a number of people. Authorities said the incident happened shortly after 8pm in Vancouver’s Sunset on Fraser neighborhood as members of the Filipino community gathered to celebrate Lapu Lapu Day. The festival, which commemorates a Filipino anti-colonial leader from the 16th century, falls this year on the weekend before Canada’s election. A 30-year-old local man was arrested at the scene, Vancouver police wrote on X. The driver was a “lone suspect” known to police, a police spokesperson told journalists at the
North Korean leader Kim Jong-un has unveiled a new naval destroyer, claiming it as a significant advancement toward his goal of expanding the operational range and preemptive strike capabilities of his nuclear-armed military, state media said yesterday. North Korea’s state-run Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) said Kim attended the launching ceremony for the 5,000-tonne warship on Friday at the western port of Nampo. Kim framed the arms buildup as a response to perceived threats from the US and its allies in Asia, who have been expanding joint military exercises amid rising tensions over the North’s nuclear program. He added that the acquisition
RSS