Whipping their backs until they pour blood then nailing themselves to crosses, these are the Filipino Catholics who perform gruesome religious rituals to seek forgiveness for their sins before Easter.
Crowds of half-naked devotees took to the streets of Mandaluyong, east of Manila, on Thursday to carry out self-inflicted pain like flagellation and crucifixion re-enactments to show their faith.
The gory ritual is carried out in the primarily Catholic nation before Easter as a form of worship believed to cleanse the sins of the devotees, cure illnesses and even grant wishes.
Despite the Catholic Church strongly condemning the practice, crowds of sightseers could be seen lining the sun-drenched streets to watch the extreme form of worship.
A pair of masked devotes are seen sprawled on the road with bloody gashes on their back after being whipped by chains and bamboo sticks.
Other worshipers tie rope around their arms and legs and lacerate their backs with razorblades, before marching through sweltering heat to pray at makeshift altars.
Men dressed as soldiers of the Roman Empire are seen hauling pitchforks to the Good Friday reenactment outside a church.
But the most extreme part of the celebration is the ritual crucifixions, which are carried out on the belief Christ died for the salvation of humanity.
The nails go through both hands and both feet, but do not bear the weight of the penitents, who spend only a few minutes on the cross before being taken down and having their bloody wounds treated.
Over 80 percent of Filipinos practice the Catholic religion, however as these unsettling images show, their practice are a far cry from the traditional Roman Catholic observances of Holy Week.
Thousands of Jewish worpshippers converge at the Western Wall in Jerusalem for Passover
Meanwhile, a very different religious ceremony was unfolding in the Middle East.
An estimated 80,000 Jewish worshippers were photographed converging for a priestly blessing at the Western Wall of Jerusalem’s Old City – the holiest site in the city.
Covered in prayer shawls, with their backs to the wall, the hundreds of male priests raised their hands and chanted the words of the blessing.
In two separate ceremonies for men and women, large crowds spillled out from the wall’s plaza to surrounding areas for the blessing.
Many of the participants were ultra-Orthodox Jews in dark suits and hats, but representatives of other segments of Israeli society, as well as the occasional tourist, could be seen in the crowds.
The blessing is part of daily prayers chanted in synagogues worldwide, but since the early 1970s, twice a year – on Passover and Sukkot, the Feast of Tabernacles – such mass events are held, evoking the biblical dictum of pilgrimage to the temple in Jerusalem on certain holidays.
To members of Israel’s small Ethiopian Jewish community, being near the site of the historic temples on Passover has special significance, with many having arrived from the African nation since the 1980s.
The Western Wall is a remnant of a supporting wall of the Second Temple complex, which was destroyed by the Romans in 70 AD.
Above it lies the plaza where the temple once stood and which now houses the Al-Aqsa mosque compound, the third holiest site in Islam.
It is the holiest site to Jews, who refer to it as the Temple Mount.
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