Welcome to Times will Tell, the weekly podcast from The Times of Israel. This week we go onsite to the banks of the Jordan River near Jericho to attend the first mass in 54 years at a Franciscan church called the St. John the Baptist Chapel.

Along with another dozen or so churches on both sides of the Jordan, the chapel commemorates the site where it is traditionally thought that Jesus was baptized. To make the day even more special, for the Catholic church that date marks the Feast of the Baptism of the Lord. Meaning, the priests were commemorating the day of Jesus’s baptism at the place where he was meant to have been baptized.

Why has it been so long since the monks were able to hold mass here? Well, the Franciscans only received permission to re-enter the church compound in October. During the 1967 Six Day War, the entire Qasr Al-Yahud baptismal site area was littered with thousands of landmines. In a cooperative, multi-year mission between the UK-based Halo Trust and the IDF, the entire area has been cleared.

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