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Every Friday night, for almost all of the night, huge crowds gather in the outskirts of Enugu, Nigeria for a prayer event that is easily among the best attended weekly gatherings in the Catholic world. Worship combines preaching, ecstatic Eucharistic adoration, two Masses, anointing and dance in a way that is hard to imagine for anyone who has not seen it before.

One of the enduring—and literally compelling—aspects of Igbo traditional culture is the practice of naming. Today, parents still choose Igbo names to carry on that tradition in Christianized fashion.

The growth of the Church in Igboland has depended from the beginning on the dedicated work of lay catechists. At Hearts of Jesus and Mary Parish there is an abundance of lay organizations.

Both traditionally and today, family is a primary social institution in Igbo tradition. Catholic belief has altered the concept of the family in limited ways, but has left traditional structures and relationships significantly intact.

Traditional Igbo society was built on a series of initiation rituals that spanned the whole course of life, from naming rituals after birth to funerals that were conceived as initiation into the realm of the ancestors. Christian missionaries worked to eliminate or replace many initiation rituals, but some continue as culturally important.

According to Igbo tradition, funerals are huge—by the financial standards of most families, extravagant—and highly ritualized events. Modernization and the advent of Christianity have done little to change that. Funerals are an occasion when two worldviews, traditional and Catholic, often play out together.

By about December 20, people who can are expected to return to their home villages to celebrate Christmas, and generally stay there until after New Year.

Remarkable as the growth of the Church was in its first 50 years, the growth and strengthening of the Church in Igboland over the next 50 years was no less remarkable.

Catholic life in Igboland is exceptionally vibrant and vital, though not without tensions and paradoxes. Catholic practice there embraces the spectrum from traditional Roman Catholic devotions like the Rosary and Eucharistic Adoration to charismatic and Pentecostal forms of dancing devotion—and in some contexts combines all of these at once.

The most visible, ritualized celebration of the Nativity of Jesus in Spain occurs not on December 25, but on the twelfth day of Christmas, January 6, the feast of Epiphany—the Día de los Reyes Magos, or Feast of the Three Kings.