1. ‘Presenting arms to the Blessed Sacrament’: civil war and Semana Santa in the city of Málaga, 1936–1939.
- Abstract
The people believe what they see as the first step to believing what they do not see; and if they see the authorities paying Catholic homage to God, if they see the armed forces presenting arms to the Blessed Sacrament, if they see the splendour of the Spanish Catholic cult, encouraged by public and ostentatious intervention by the civil and military authority, they will believe that the Truth is indeed that to which religious homage is paid. Not without reason does the supreme wisdom of the Church sustain all the splendour of the rites and external cult, against cold and self-absorbed Protestant subjectivism; not without reason does it also sustain its cult of images. During Holy Week (Semana Santa), Spanish Catholic lay associations (confraternities) known as cofradías de penitencia channel penitential devotion through advocations of Christ and the Virgin. Intensely realistic images, evoking episodes of the Passion, are carried bodily on huge swaying platforms through the city streets. Within popular Catholic practice, these pasos, dramatising the last events of Christ's earthly life, have profound resonance. Constituting the central drama of Christianity as a ‘religion of lament’, reenactment of the Passion, with the suffering body of Christ and the purity of the grieving Virgin explicitly at its centre, becomes the primary focus of the popular ‘para-liturgy’ of the street. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2005
- Full Text
- View/download PDF