Around 15,000 Christians walked, many barefoot, for six hours in the streets of Mumbai, India, on Good Friday enacting Jesus’ walk to the Cross and condemning growing attacks on the minority community.
This 24th Annual Lenten Walking Pilgrimage was held especially to give hope to and express solidarity with the persecuted Christians, the event’s chief organizer Joseph Dias told The Christian Post.
The gathering comprised of Christians from evangelical as well as mainline Protestant churches “apart from the Catholics, who formed the majority,” said Dias, who leads the organization behind the rally, Christian Revival Oriented Social Service.
“The mammoth serpentine procession of devotees wended its way through the city fasting and praying, some walking bare-foot and thereby embracing pain, to commemorate the first and final walk Jesus undertook over 2000 years ago,” said Fatima Corriea, the media assistant of CROSS.
Dias said around 10,000 Christians joined the march as it began from Sacred Heart Church in Khar in the suburb of Mumbai, India’s financial capital and the base of India’s film industry Bollywood, at 10.30 a.m. (local time). “Christians kept joining along the way and the numbers swelled to around 15,000 at the end.”
The Christians marched acting out the betrayal of Jesus by Judas, his agony in the Garden of Gethsemane and finally His passion at the cross. “The likes of such a penance which normally happens in the Philippines or Latin America, came alive as the Passion Play of Christ was dramatized.”
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