BERLIN — Women in traditional white dresses have carried a centuries-old statue of the Virgin Mary to mark Whit Monday in an annual ritual in the eastern German town of Rosenthal. Hundreds of Catholic Sorbs, a Slavic minority, held prayers in rural churches in about a dozen areas before walking to Rosenthal for another service. They then ended their pilgrimage walking with the young women carrying the 1480 wooden statue of Mary through the town to a field for an open-air mass. The ritual marks Whit Monday, the day after Whitsun or Pentecost, which falls seven weeks after Easter Sunday...
