Jim Gomez

A Filipino priest, who publicly protested then-President Rodrigo Duterte's bloody crackdown against illegal drugs despite death threats and helped provide proper funerals to those killed, is among the winners of this year's Ramon Magsaysay Awards — Asia's version of the Nobel Prize.

The Philippines is the third-largest Roman Catholic nation in the world, and public discussions of sexual assaults by members of the clergy, who are revered especially in rural regions, has long been generally muted.

The restrictions and dwindling crowds in religiously diverse places of worship underscore the extent of the scare over the outbreak that has permeated many aspects of life in the hard-hit Asian region.

A mammoth crowd of mostly barefoot Filipino Catholics prayed for peace in the Middle East on Thursday at the start of an annual procession of a centuries-old black statue of Jesus Christ in one of Asia's biggest religious events.

President Rodrigo Duterte has decided to end more than two years of martial law in the southern Philippines after government forces weakened Islamic militant groups there with the capture and killing of their leaders, his spokesman said Tuesday.