Malaga's pride

Each year during the Semana Santa, the Holy Week, penance processions stride with barok pomp the streets of many Spanish cities and towns. Will they carry on?

Each year during the Semana Santa, the Holy Week, penance processions stride with barok pomp the streets of many Spanish cities and towns. It is Malaga’s pride to claim that their brotherhoods carry the largest scenes from the gospels related to the Passion of Christ and the Sorrows of Virgin Mary. The statues are here placed on so called tronos and not pasos like in the rest of Spain. The spectacle always attracts hundreds of thousands of spectators.

That was no different this year. Faith must remain strong here one would think. However. In that same special week the local newspaper Sur drew attention to a noteworthy social change in the last 40 years. More than half of all births in Malaga province are now to parents who are not married. This would have been completely unimaginable in the 1980s, when the percentage was less than 5%. It is cristal clear that family life shifted in the past 40 years to a new social reality. So here too the Church must have lost her grip on private life.

Que sera? Since Malaga’s population has so rapidly and radically changed, must this be considered as a warning to the Semana Santa? Will it become quickly something of the past? Or could it be that in the near future the ancient tradition of the processions will be kept strong anchored into society, but at the same time evolves towards an instrument for community building? That into that new society the new generations embosom what was good and in the meantime move gradual towards diversity?