YANGON (UCAN): Catholics in Myanmar prayed for peace and for those who lost their lives in conflicts as people across the country marked Thadingyut, the festival of lights.
Buddhists celebrated the three-day festival from October 8 to 10 when thousands visited pagodas to pray and offer flowers, lit candles, and released colourful paper lanterns.
Meanwhile, Independent Catholics for Justice in Myanmar, a group of clergy, religious, and laypeople at home and abroad, organised prayers for peace and for those who died in their pursuit of democracy in Myanmar.
“At this time of the festival, we pray that civilians in the country have a peaceful and secure life and are not subject to unjust acts of arbitrary arrests, torture, jailing, destroying homes and properties and killings by the junta,” the group said in a statement.
During Sunday Mass on October 9, Charles Cardinal Bo of Yangon, decried a “new dark age across the world” where people are battling multifaceted wars—dictatorship versus democracy, truth versus lies, light versus darkness, and those who fight for freedom versus dictators.
“In our country, thousands of people are suffering from the crisis of political, economic, and humanitarian while churches and monasteries have been bombed, villages have been burned and the people are killed,” Cardinal Bo said in his homily.
He urged Catholics to be like Easter people who do not lose hope as the journey to Calvary is yet to end.
“I pray to God to bring peace immediately to my country as I am concerned that more fighting will break out and more people will suffer,” one Catholic, who requested anonymity, said after the Mass.
The prayers came as Myanmar continues to witness armed resistance against the military junta, which has unleashed air strikes against and shelled civilians that saw thousands of people flee their homes and seek refuge in nearby jungles or in churches and monasteries.
