Good Friday his advisers, decreed that Good Friday that year would be a holiday. This was Castro's response to a request made personally to him by Pope Benedict XVI during the latter's Apostolic Visitation to the island and León, Mexico that month. The move followed the pattern of small advances in Cuba's relations with the Vatican, mirroring Pope John Paul II's success in getting Fidel Castro to declare Christmas Day a holiday. Both Good Friday and Christmas are now annual holidays in Cuba. In Hong Kong, despite the transfer of sovereignty from the UK to China in 1997, Good Friday continues to
Good Friday prayer for the Jews kneel during the prayer for the conversion of the Jews (even though moments of kneeling in silent prayer were prescribed for all of the other petitions in the Good Friday rite), because, as the famous liturgist Dom Prosper Guéranger, O.S.B., said: Others disagreed with this explanation; the Russian-Jewish historian Solomon Lurie wrote in his 1922 book on antisemitism in antiquity that this explanation was arbitrary and "ad hoc" invented: according to the Gospels, it was the Roman soldiers, not the Jews, who mocked Christ. Lurie quotes Kane who wrote that "all authors tried to justify the practice that had existed