ISRAEL: Easter in the Holy Land

Thousands of religious pilgrims flood into Jerusalem every Easter weekend. This year, one of the more low-key worshippers was Vice-President Dick Cheney, who arrived in Jerusalem Saturday for meetings with Israeli and Palestinian leaders.

Cheney and his family celebrated mass amid Lazarist monks at a small chapel attached to the US Consulate in Jerusalem.

In Bethlehem’s Church of the Nativity, religious pilgrims crowded into the chamber believed to house Jesus’ birthplace. American, Nigerian and French tour groups each took turns singing “Away in the Manger.”

Deep inside Jerusalem’s Old City, hundreds of believers crowded into the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, believed to be the site of Jesus’ crucifixion, burial and resurrection.

Archbishop Michel Sabbah, the top Roman Catholic Authority in Jerusalem, turned his sermon into an appeal for an end to decades of Israeli-Palestinian bloodshed.

The conflict has turned life in the Holy land into “a permanent cross, a place of blood and hate,” said Sabbah, a Palestinian, who announced his retirement earlier this month.

“To believe Jesus rose from the dead is to believe and hope that this land…can also resurrect, provided that minds and hearts are purified of the evil of war, hostility and the distrust that are deeply ingrained in it,” Sabbah said.

— Ashraf Khalil in Jerusalem