'A season of prayer, fasting, sacrifice, renewal, and celebration', Benedict Rogers

Let us together, in our diverse ways, work to build a better, freer, more peaceful, and more hopeful world

This week, the world’s two largest religions — Christianity and Islam — began their seasons of fasting and prayer, Lent and Ramadan, on the same day.

At the same time, the Lunar New Year — celebrated not only by Chinese people across China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand and beyond but also on the Korean Peninsula and Vietnam — began at the same time, as did the Tibetan New Year or Losar.

Across the world, over 4.5 billion people are praying and fasting, while hundreds of millions of people are celebrating the Year of the Fire Horse.

In the coming weeks, Hindus will celebrate the festival of Holi, Jews will mark Purim — a festival that celebrates the saving of the Jewish people from annihilation — and the Passover, and Theravada Buddhists will mark their new year, or ‘Water Festival.’

The Muslim season of fasting and prayer — Ramadan — is shorter than Lent, ending on March 19, but it is much more intense and demanding. Muslims who take it seriously fast from dawn until dusk each day, abstaining from food and water.

For Christians, Lent ends with the celebration of Easter on April 5, but the obligation for fasting is more flexible. We are expected to fast, pray and give ‘alms,’ making donations to charity, but how we fast is up to us. We might give up something for Lent — chocolate, alcohol, coffee, social media; we might abstain from meat on certain days during the season; or we might, as I do, choose to fast from food periodically during the season or from one particular meal a day on certain days.

My practice, developed over recent years, is to fast fully every Friday, dedicating each Friday’s prayers and fasting to a particular people or part of the world that is close to my heart.

This year, as every year, I have made a plan for my Friday fasting and prayer throughout Lent.

Today, the first Friday of Lent, I am devoting my fast to prayers for Hong Kong, for all political prisoners in the city, and in particular for the release of my friend Jimmy Lai, who last week was sentenced to 20 years in jail.

Jimmy Lai, aged 78, is Hong Kong’s most prominent lay Catholic and a British citizen. He has already spent over five years in jail, mostly in solitary confinement, and is in deteriorating health. It is now highly likely that he will die in jail, unless there is enough pressure for his release on humanitarian grounds. I am praying for his release today, as I pray every day. I will also be praying for the release of lawyers Chow Hang-Tung and Albert Ho, trade unionist Lee Cheuk-yan, and all of Hong Kong’s other political prisoners.

Next Friday, my prayers and fasting will be devoted to the Uyghurs, a predominantly Muslim people in the Xinjiang region of China facing incarceration, religious persecution, sexual violence, slave labor and — as increasingly recognised by governments, legislatures and experts around the world — a slow genocide.

The following week my focus will be Tibet, whose predominantly Buddhist people face religious persecution, surveillance, repression, torture, and a cultural genocide caused by a policy of forced assimilation resulting in the forcible transfer of more than a million children into colonial-style boarding schools. Tibetan children are being separated from their families, cut off from their language, prohibited from speaking their language, and denied the right to practice their religion.

After that, my prayers will laser in on mainland China as a whole, particularly for persecuted Christians, Falun Gong practitioners, the people of Southern (or Inner) Mongolia, as well as dissidents, human rights defenders, bloggers, journalists and civil society activists. I will pray for people like dissidents Xu Zhiyong and Ding Jiaxi, citizen journalist and lawyer Zhang Zhang, pro-democracy activist Dr Wang Bingzhang, and Pastor Wang Yi.

Then my focus will turn to the world’s most closed nation, North Korea. Twelve years ago, the United Nations judged in a commission of inquiry that “the gravity, scale and nature” of the appalling human rights violations by North Korea’s regime “reveal a state that does not have any parallel in the contemporary world”. It recommended that Kim Jong-Un’s crimes against humanity be called to account at the International Criminal Court. Now, Kim Jong-Un appears to be lining up his young daughter to succeed him. The world must wake up, dust off the commission of inquiry’s report, put the crisis back on the agenda, and think of new avenues for justice, accountability and ultimately liberation for North Korea.

On the penultimate Friday of Lent, I will dedicate my fast and prayers to Myanmar, whose human rights crisis is among the most egregious in the world and yet one of the most forgotten. Five years on from the coup that overthrew a democratically elected government, I will be praying for the more than 22,000 political prisoners, including the country’s jailed elected leader Aung San Suu Kyi, for the almost four million internally displaced people and millions more refugees, and for the millions of people who endure daily airstrikes, repression and dire poverty.

On Good Friday, the direction of my prayers will be for the free world — the United States, the United Kingdom, the European Union, Canada, Australia, Japan, and two of its most vulnerable members, Taiwan and Ukraine.

I will be praying that the world’s democracies wake up and act to defend our values of freedom, the rule of law and human rights, and step up to defend Taiwan against increasing threats from China and of course Ukraine in its tragic hour of need. It is no coincidence that as the season of Lent began, we mark the fourth anniversary of Vladimir Putin’s brutal and illegal invasion of Ukraine. I pray daily that as Ukraine endures its four-year Calvary, it will before too long experience its Resurrection. I pray daily #SlavaUkraini.

That agenda of prayer and fasting will take me up to Easter, where we celebrate the Resurrection.

Throughout Lent, we seek to balance a share in the agony of our Lord’s Passion and Crucifixion — the world’s most cruel betrayal, most unjust arbitrary arrest, and most egregious execution — with the knowledge that that is not the end of the story.

We don’t celebrate Easter until we get there — and in the Catholic Church’s liturgy, there are no ‘Alleluias’ in Lent — but nevertheless, our sights are fixed on that Resurrection hope that we journey towards throughout this season of sacrifice and prayer.

Of course my Friday focuses throughout this season do not mean that these and other parts of the world do not feature in my prayers on other days — they do, daily.

Indeed, on Ash Wednesday — a day of fasting for Catholics — I dedicated my prayers specifically to the release of jailed Chinese pastor Ezra Jin Mingri, Uyghur doctor Gulshan Abbas, Chinese student Tara Zhang Yadi who had simply been raising awareness about Tibet, and Chinese-born Swedish national and publisher Gui Minhai. I know the daughters of Pastor Ezra Jin and Gui Minhai, the sister of Gulshan Abbas, and the friends of Tara Zhang Yadi, and I join hands with them in solidarity, advocacy and prayer for their release.

Yet as we Christians and Muslims fast and pray, I want also to celebrate with my friends marking the Lunar New Year. And as we embark on a season of sacrifice and spiritual disciplines, let us be inspired by the characteristics of the Year of the Fire Horse — strength, courage, determination, swiftness, freedom, endurance, vitality, passion and dynamism. Let those characteristics propel us into a renewed effort to mobilise the world to defend freedom and counter repression and autocracy.

And as we Christians and Muslims journey on our respective seasons of fasting and prayer, let us show solidarity with each other. Whatever our differences, we should always defend the human rights of everyone to believe what they wish, to practice their beliefs, and to change those beliefs, and recognise, celebrate and cherish the human dignity that is in every human being regardless of creed: the Imago Dei, the Image of God in each of us.

During this season of prayer, fasting, sacrifice, renewal, and celebration, let us together, in our diverse ways, work to build a better, freer, more peaceful, and more hopeful world.

This article was published in UCA News on 20 February 2026.

Photo: Pakkin Leung, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons