Nilushan Prasad Fernando, a government school teacher in Sri Lanka, observes that Catholics are again celebrating feast days and there are Sunday school sessions for children.
 

COLOMBO (UCAN): Catholic churches in Sri Lanka reopened for Sunday Mass on the weekend of May 12 as bishops stepped up efforts to ensure interfaith harmony following the Easter Sunday suicide bomb attacks that killed 258 people.
 
Church-run schools are also slated to reopen after state schools resumed classes on May 6.
 
Malcolm Cardinal Ranjith said Sunday Mass were resumed after consideration of the security situation in the country.
 

BANGKOK (CNS): “I don’t know what to say to them. I try. I tried to go to their funerals and I tried to embrace them and tell them I am with them, but I have no words to say. I am suffering with them,” Malcolm Cardinal Ranjith of Sri Lanka told Canadian Broadcasting Corp. Radio (CBC) in the wake of the deadly Easter bombings in his country (Sunday Examiner, April 28).
 
“There are no words with which I can console my people,” he lamented.
 

VATICAN CITY (CNS): On Easter Monday, Pope Francis led thousands of people in St. Peter’s Square in praying for the hundreds of people who died or were injured in bomb blasts at churches and hotels in three cities on Easter Sunday in Sri Lanka. 
 
The violence was the deadliest the country has seen since a 26-year civil war ended in 2009.