Every year during Lent, the role of Christ bearing his cross to Calvary is re-enacted in the village of Sartene, Corsica. This has been going on ever since the Middle Ages, and it always draws a big crowd of villagers and thousands of tourists who come for the occasion.

Time magazine, when reporting on one of the more recent episodes, called it "one of the world’s most brutally powerful Holy Week processions." And the report was a graphic description of what happened:

A grotesque lump of a man ... barefoot, masked in a blood-red hood with eye slits ... staggered under the weight of a massive oak cross. From his right ankle dragged a clanking, thirty-one-pound chain ... He grunted and puffed as he bore the cross along a one and a half mile route ... struggled painfully up flights of ancient g…