Rites of Holy Week

The Trappist monastery church

WHILE many left Hong Kong during the Easter holidays for vacations abroad, some Catholic Filipinos who stayed in the city marked Holy Week with two traditional Christian devotions: the Way of the Cross on Good Friday and a Salubong on Easter Sunday.

Some Catholics held the annual Good Friday Stations of the Cross as they trekked to the Our Lady of Joy Abbey, a Trappist Monastery, in Tai Shu Hang in Lantau. Hundreds boarded the ferry to Lantau while others walked from nearby Discovery Bay and Mui Wo.

The Stations of the Cross, with its 14 stations, commemorates the Passion of Jesus Christ along the Via Dolorosa (Way of Sorrows) in Jerusalem before his crucifixion. The throng that gathered in Lantau on
Good Friday was large stretching from one Station of the Cross to another. This annual Lenten tradition in Lantau began in the late 1990s.

After the walk was finished, the faithful gathered outside the monastery, praying before an image of Our Lady in Fatima while others went into the monastery church, where some of the Trappist monks
were praying.

On Easter Sunday, the Catholic community of Our Lady of Fatima Parish in Lamma Island held for the third time its annual Salubong, a traditional Filipino devotion that reenacts the encounter between the risen Christ and his mother, the Virgin Mary.

The parish also hosts the Portiuncula Monastery of Poor Claire nuns. “This is a testament of the Filipinos’ enduring faith and our celebration of our Lord’s resurrection,” said Catherine Marsden, one of the organizers of the event. After the Salubong, the community also held a Easter Sunday egg hunt for the young ones.