This Sunday is one of the most important dates on the Roman Catholic calendar.
Catholic churches like Our Lady of the Mountains in Whistler will be packed to standing room only this weekend; this is one Sunday mass that Catholics are not supposed to miss.
But this year Easter comes at a time when the Catholic church is bending under the weight of heady accusations of widespread sexual abuse and cover-ups from the top.
This year Catholics throughout the world might be taking a harder look at their faith as their church struggles to come to terms with another grisly chapter in its long, controversial history.
They might be asking why the same sad story continues to plague their church.
It's the story of men in position of trust, abusing teenaged boys, and of higher ups protecting the guilty.
In B.C. a RCMP Native Indian Residential School Task Force was formed about seven years ago.
The task force was set up to investigate complaints of physical and sexual abuse at church-run residential schools around B.C. Some of those schools are Catholic schools.
Six former church employees have been charged with sex offences so far.
More recently, two high profile cases of sexual abuses from the clergy have come to light in the U.S.
These stories involve a Boston cardinal who knowingly covered the actions of a pedophile priest and a Florida bishop who molested teenage boys in the 1970's.
And the scandals don't stop in America.
The church in Ireland paid out $175-milllion to sex abuse victims earlier this year. The archbishop of Vienna was disgraced over accusations he was abusing seminary students. A Polish archbishop has been accused of the same thing.
And in Africa stories are coming to the surface about nuns being abused by priests, an ongoing problem that the nuns claim the Vatican knew about all along.
The accusations have spread wherever the church has spread. And the church has spread everywhere.
In his annual Easter-time letter to the clergy, Pope John Paul II addressed the issue at hand.
He wrote:
"As priests we are personally and profoundly afflicted by the sins of some of our brothers who have betrayed the grace of ordination in succumbing even to the most grievous forms of the mystery of evil at work in the world."
The recent developments and the bad public image couldn't come at a worse time.
These days young men aren't exactly banging down the church doors for job interviews.
"We don't have many going into the seminaries," said Father Jerry Desmond, the priest who will be saying Easter Mass in Whistler this year.
"(The recent scandals) don't help young people to line up and become priests."
This shortfall in the clergy has been felt in Whistler since the last resident-priest retired about three years ago.
Since then there just hasn't been another priest in the diocese of Kamloops to fill his shoes. Instead, priests usually travel from Squamish on the weekend to take up the duties here.
The church is also struggling to keep the faith alive in younger Catholics and entice them to church.
But if the church is to stay alive, it must face some harsh truths about itself.
Many feel that the requirement of celibacy, which has been a part of the church since the 12 th century, might be at the root of the problem.
But Desmond points out that Catholic priests aren't the only ones guilty of sexual misconduct in their professional life.
There have been other clergy, not just the Catholic clergy. There have been married clergy.
Some doctors, teachers, coaches, parents, to name a few, have also betrayed their trust the same way.
Not all Catholic priests can be painted with the same brush. There are many good faithful honest priests and the actions of a few do not equal the actions of many.
And it must be recognized that the church is trying to clean up its act.
In Canada, sexual abuse committees are a part of every Catholic diocese and they are called together by the bishop whenever an accusation comes to light.
Society will not tolerate the continued sins of the past any longer.
Still, the church has a lot of explaining to do. People want answers to the questions of the massive cover-ups. People want answers to the questions of why errant priests were merely shipped from one place to another to avoid scandal.
And of course there is the bigger question of how the actions of the clergy ultimately affect faith in the church.
"There will be individuals (who question)... but I don't think there will be very many who will be abandoning their faith," said Desmond.
From the outside the church will not look sick this weekend. Millions of the faithful will flock to church on Good Friday and Easter Sunday to remember why Jesus died on the cross.
But while the churches are packed to the brim, there may be many within the walls who are no longer satisfied with their church.
