While Christians comprise only two percent of the population in their holiest city, the sheer density of Christian holy sites and the thousands of foreign Christian visitors within the city at any given time gives the community a visibility beyond what its numbers would suggest. And at no time is the Christian community more prominent than on Palm Sunday, when local Christians join forces with the throngs of pilgrims and take to the streets in a jubilant reenactment of Jesus' fateful arrival in Jerusalem.
While the holiday is observed by both Western and Eastern branches of Christianity, it does not always fall on the same day for both, and the celebratory processions of thousands of faithful through the Old City is largely a Catholic phenomenon. The Palm Sunday procession, a reenactment of the arrival of Jesus and his discples in Jerusalem, is of course a feature of Catholic Palm Sunday worship the world over, but only in Jerusalem herself can the flock follow the literal steps of Jesus.
The crowd, which has numbered more than 20,000 in recent years, is headed by the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, the head of the Catholic Church in the Holy Land, and more often than not a phalanx of prominent members of the clergy from Vatican City and elsewhere. From atop the Mount of Olives, one-time location of the villages of Bethphage and Bethany where Jesus and his disciples plotted their triumphant entry into the city, the throng descends towards the Old City, waving the palm fronds the people of Jerusalem once threw across the path of Jesus atop his donkey. After descending the slopes into the Kidron Valley, they triumphantly pass through St. Stephen's Gate and march through the narrow streets of the Muslim and Christian Quarters, singing hymns all the while.
