After sombre week, Pope leads Catholics into Easter stressing hope

After a Holy Week blighted by bomb attacks in Brussels, Pope Francis led the world's 1.2 billion Roman Catholics into Easter celebrations by urging them not to lose hope in a gloomy world. "Let us not allow darkness and fear to distract us and control us," Francis said in a homily at an evening Easter vigil Mass in St. Peter's Basilica. The Holy Week services leading up to Easter, already the most sombre in the Christian liturgical calendar because they commemorate Jesus' betrayal and death by crucifixion, have been further dampened by the attacks in Brussels that killed at least 31 people. The pope condemned them several times during the week and at a Good Friday service in Rome, saying that followers of religions who carried out acts of fundamentalism or terrorism were profaning God's name.. But hope was the theme of Saturday night's service. The pope used the word about 20 times in his brief homily, woven around the Christian belief that Jesus rose from the dead three days after his crucifixion. "May the Lord free us ... from being Christians without hope, who live as if the Lord were not risen, as if our problems were the centre of our lives," he said. At the start of the...

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