öA handful of Franciscan priests celebrating Holy Saturday at the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem. (WAFA Images / Afif Amira) 

JERUSALEM, Saturday, April 11, 2020 (WAFA) – While celebrating Holy Saturday at the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, the site of the crucifixion and burial of Jesus Christ, in Jerusalem’s Old City which often attracts thousands of local and international pilgrims and tourists, this year only a handful of priests celebrated Holy Saturday, known also as Holy Fire, at the church following severe restriction on gatherings and movement due to the coronavirus outbreak.

Yesterday also a handful of Franciscan priests led by the Apostolic Administrator of the Latin Patriarchate in Jerusalem, Archbishop Pierbattista Pizzaballa, marked Good Friday festivities that precede the Sunday Easter holiday according to the Gregorian calendar. In normal times, tens of thousands of people would follow the path Christ took before his crucifixion known today as Via Delarosa, stop and pray at the various stations along the ally that ends at the Holy Sepulcher.

“The days we are experiencing are marked by a great void: void of rituals, void of faces, void of presences, void of contacts,” said Pizzaballa in his Easter Vigil homily at the Holy Sepulcher. “A widespread and violent pandemic has taken away our certainties, our habits, our feasts, our meetings. A fear, mixed with disorientation and bewilderment, has taken hold of us. We feel lost, confused, blind. We cannot read what is happening very well, we cannot see or glimpse what it will be, how we will be, how and if we will resume our life.”

He added: “I therefore believe that, in the days and months to come, we will all need a renewed capacity for contemplation, we will need a new vision. It will not be enough, and perhaps courage only will not help to face the inevitable difficulties and the announced human, social and economic crisis that this tragedy will provoke. Courage thrives on vision and perspective, otherwise it is only muscular performance, which soon gets tired.

“Vision: here is what we ask, here is what we want. Knowing how to comprehend pain and death, new things that God creates and recreates.”

M.K.