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At both Christmas and Easter liturgies, dance is incorporated into Catholic worship, to communicate the importance of these days and to help tell the stories behind them. Yapese Catholics spoke about these dances as means to communicate what’s most sacred and deep about the Christian story in their own language and mode of expression.

One of the most distinctive ritual experiences of Yapese Catholicism is a ritual wherein women sit around the image of Christ on the Cross and wail to recount and mourn Jesus’ Passion. Its expressive power is matched in few Catholic contexts.

As is true anywhere, Holy Week is a time of intense liturgical activity in Yap. The liturgy follows the normal Catholic form, augmented by two especially interesting rituals, the doloolow, a mourning ritual at the Cross on Good Friday, and the thanksgiving dance for the Easter vigil.

Yap is the most heavily Catholic of the states in the Federated States of Micronesia. Though this account concerns a quite small community of people compared to the world’s billion-plus Catholics, the ways that Yapese culture interacts with Catholicism are intriguing.

Though Catholicism and Protestantism came late to Chuuk, the islands became almost entirely Christian in a relatively short time. On islands that had once been fiercely resistant to Christianity, the catechists and Jesuits made surprisingly rapid progress spreading the faith.

The humid, tropical environment, and sometime brutal typhoons have a habit of undoing the built environment quickly. Micronesian religious culture recognizes that reality about the world, and has found ways to bring the beauty of that world into worship.

Though the vast majority of Micronesians identify as Christian (just over half the population identifies as Catholic), Christianity came late to these islands, beginning in the 1850s. Today the Church relies on a large number of lay catechists and deacons.

Compared to western Europeans, Ukrainians stand out on several fronts as more socially conservative.

A visit to any of the major older churches of Lviv shows just how much Lviv was a crossroads of cultures. Extraordinary Baroque—quintessentially Roman style—churches, legacies of Polish and Austro-Hungarian rule, are decorated with the iconostasis screens and other elements that aim to mark them as Byzantine.

Migration has radically expanded the footprint of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church in the last 135 years, and brought the Church into very different cultural contexts. But as the community has moved out of ethno-religious enclaves in the United States and Canada, the numbers there have rapidly declined.