-   D. Agapito Gómez García, brother in the priesthood and friend, parish priest of Santa María de Villafáfila.

-    To the Pro-Easter Board and members.

-    To the Mayoress, Mrs. Susana de Caso Bausela and civil authorities of this Villa.

-   I greet all of you with affection, family and friends, from near and far, from my beloved town.  

And I do it with that greeting in the Guarani language, which I did so many times, on the radio, in my religious programs in Paraguay, where I was a missionary, from 1971 to '90.

¡Ta -Ñandé py'aguapý oñondivé Cristo-rupí!

May the peace of the Lord be with you!

D. Volusiano Calzada Fidalgo

 

This year I have the great honor of being invited by the Junta Pro-Holy Week of my town as Town Crier, who was going to tell me when I was an altar boy! I also want to share with you my double joy because tomorrow, April 18, I will celebrate 40 years of priestly ordination.

                         You couldn't have given me a better gift!

  Well, I was born in 1942, I was baptized two weeks later (August 23), I made my first communion when I was almost nine years old, being the parish priest D. Francisco Lera García , and from a very young age I lived Holy Week with enthusiasm, recollection and not a little curiosity at the same time, just as I experienced it within my family. I remember as an altar boy, the Stations of the Cross that we prayed very early in the Church, every Friday during Lent and it was very cold.

I bring here, to memory, people who influenced my life: in addition to my dear parents: Leónides and Florencia, my 6 brothers and all the relatives, the teachers: D. Tarsilo, D. Fernando and D. Laurentino. To the Priests: D. Francisco Lera, (D. Avelino, D. Leónides, D. Víctor), to D. Camilo Pérez who came to the town when I went to Coreses, in 1955.

I want to remind + D. Alejandro Tejedor, RIP. Priest, son of this town, deceased a few months ago.

  + And also to a woman, + to PURI , RIP, who stood out for her simplicity and service, linked to the Parish and to Holy Week for her enthusiasm for the songs and the Stations of the Cross

  From the age of 12, I could hardly participate in Holy Week here because I began, by my own desire, my studies at the College/Seminary of the Divine Word Missionaries in Coreses. Then came my Novitiate stage in Dueñas (Palencia) and later, my higher studies at the SVD Major Seminary in Zizur Menor Navarra, near Pamplona, ​​where I was ordained a priest on April 18, 1971, as I have already said, with three more companions: one from Navarra, one from La Rioja and one from the Philippines; and another three more, which were ordered in October. 

  For almost 20 years I worked as a Missionary in Paraguay (2971-1990) and there I missed Holy Week in my land, because there were hardly any images, nor the spirit of "semana-santero" here and that made me miss it still. plus. I only experienced Holy Week in my town on a few occasions and one of them, sadly, coincided with the death of my father, shortly before. On this occasion it seemed to me that the recollection and affection that I remembered from then had diminished.

During the two years of my stay in Ireland, England and Scotland there were no processions in the parishes where I was. (1982-4).

Holy Week was also different in the seven years that I was stationed in Rome; Well, as you know, being the Holy See of the Vatican, it was a very heartfelt and very enriching experience. (1990-97).

After the 6 years that I worked in Madrid in the Lavapiés neighborhood with immigrants and in the Virgen del Alba Parish in Alcorcón; Already in 2005, I was assigned to my beloved land of Zamora, where I had the opportunity to live Holy Week with more intensity, just as I remembered it. (1997-2005).

(I remember, by the way, tomorrow, Holy Monday, as Chaplain, I will preside over the procession of the Holy Christ of the Good Death, which leaves at 12 o'clock at night and returns again to the parish of San Vicente Mártir, in Zamora)

Introduction to the celebration of Holy Week.

"Because you have generously established this time of grace to renew your children in holiness, so that, free from all disordered affection, we live the realities of the present time as an anticipation of eternal realities"  (Preface Lent II)

Supplication to the Lord                

Day by day we will accompany you in this Holy Week. It is quite a transformation that you have to achieve in us, Lord. We are busy and worried about many things, they are small things, minutiae, perhaps, that distract us, that bind us, that materialize us, that distance us from you. That is why, Lord, we need to return to you, to convert, to live these days as an example of purification “this is the time of grace; this is the day of salvation . ” And we, facing this Holy Week, need to get out of ourselves and meet you. But in reality, it is You who come to meet us.

We are now ready for the celebration of the Paschal Mystery, which is a time to contemplate this Mystery; time to join Jesus who passes before us with the cross on his shoulder. Cross of death and life, cross of opprobrium and victory, cross, ultimately, of salvation for those who believe in Him, who has made death life, and his death, Life for all humanity. (D.5º Lent)

How should we celebrate these days?

They must prevail: The simplicity of the celebrations and also the participation of the people in them because both are mutually involved. Yes, what is being celebrated there must appear simply and clearly: Christ who loves, serves and gives himself to the point of giving his life, and whom the Father will rescue from death and glorify. Although we are witnessing a time of growing "secularism" that more than revealing the mystery, obscures it, behind rites that transmit little or nothing, and to which, many times, the people passively attend.

Behold, the prophets harshly castigate the empty cult, isolated from life, from justice and from the poor. And Jesus, in his encounter with the Samaritan woman, gives us the criteria on the worshipers that He wants: in spirit and in truth. Jesus, the poor and the suffering, is the temple in which God truly wants to be worshiped at the impulse of his spirit.

The other criterion, closely linked to simplicity, is that of the participation of the people. The Council wants celebrations in which the community appears as a celebrant and offerer. They offer the divine victim to God and offer themselves together with it. He reminded us that in the liturgical celebration "the faithful participate in it consciously, actively and fruitfully", in "a full, active and communal celebration".

And now, I invite you to make a unique Way of the Cross, because we will do it considering each of the processions that will parade through the streets of our town these days.

Palm Sunday

We have already started Holy Week today accompanying Jesus entering Jerusalem with our blessed branches. We follow Jesus because his love until death is life forever. We acclaim him and we are happy to go with him, and we are ready to accompany him, step by step, on his painful path towards death and resurrection.

Anecdote : I remember that phrase that we used to say when we were little: “He who does not wear anything on Palm Sunday has no feet or hands”, and, especially boys and girls, we always wore a new garment.

Holy Wednesday: Procession of Silence . (Since 2000)

It is the brotherhood of Santo Cristo de la Misericordia. Taking of the oath and singing of the Miserere. The Holy Christ of Mercy comes out through our streets. This procession is marked by Silence.- Before the crucified Christ we feel like sinners and ask for forgiveness: We ask for forgiveness and promise that there will be no more lies in our lives; for us to be authentic; so that the SS is not a “white lie”, an appearance of religiosity, or an apparent farce. For the SS to be that: holy in us . The lie, like war and sin. It begins in the heart of man and it is from there, from our heart, that we have to uproot everything that is not true, everything that is a lie, everything that is not authentic. 

Jacinto Fuertes Trabadillo says in a poem dedicated to the memory of Holy Week and the Christ of Mercy:

Seniors, youth, children

present in my memory

that you show great affection

to the Christ of Mercy.

 

Young people who took it

With enthusiasm and with faith,

May you carry it for many years

Just like ninety-three

 

I was young like you

And to you I address

When you can't with him

Let your children take it

 

And at the end of our life

Let us say to that Christ,

You who are Mercy

Forgive our sins.

Reflection:

You see Lord, this is what we are, this is the reality of our life and our misery. But in you is mercy and forgiveness. Begin Lord to make us less bad. You start first and we will also get down to work.

We want to live and we are willing not to let ourselves be carried away by selfishness, even if we let ourselves be carried away by evil and, as you know us well, we trust in your infinite mercy...

                                                   ***

Sacred Triduum: Thursday Friday and Saturday

The figure of Jesus, his love for humanity until death must occupy the heart of each one of us as believers, and of the Church, which we form and are, as a community.

The cross and life continue to be real companions on the journey of our personal and collective history. The crucified of today must continue to attract our gaze. Life, the resurrection, is our supreme vocation: to live and give life.

These are days of prioritizing liturgical celebrations, of actively participating in them,

-   to receive communion, on Holy Thursday, with Christ placed at the feet and at the service of his own, whom he calls friends and tells them that he loves them and that they love each other.

-   Communion, on Friday, with the remains of one who has died on the Cross, naked and abandoned.

-   Communion on Easter morning with the risen Christ, welcomed by the Father in death and glorified and constituted Lord and Living One who gives life.

We must live these three days in intimate unity, without separating one from the other. Love, service, dedication, death and resurrection are steps of the one who is the Way, the Truth and the Life; Christ, the Lord. And they are also our steps. (From Eucharist 2010)

 Thursday:

-   Celebration of the Lord's Supper.

Eucharist : There in the cenacle we contemplate Jesus washing the feet of his disciples, as a sign of his dedication. And we listen to how he leaves us bread and wine as a permanent sacrament of his presence among us, to accompany us throughout life, thus instituting the Eucharist and the sacrament of Holy Orders.

How I want to thank the Lord for my priesthood lived in these 40 years, I must thank the Church, the Congregation of the Divine Word, where you anointed me priest with your Spirit and who also anointed Saint Arnold Janssen, our holy founder. To him and to all my missionary brothers I must give heartfelt thanks. And to all of you who make up the ecclesial community of my town, Villafáfila, and to all my dear family, especially my late parents. 

Charity day par excellence, Holy Thursday

Charity is an essential dimension of every baptized person and in every Christian community; it has multiple ways to manifest itself and can be lived in many ways. The new times, the new poverties will also ask us for new ways that it is necessary to find and mature. Let's not forget it.

Procession of Penance with the Ecce Homo

I always looked at this image with great admiration. Jesus tied to a column, beaten and mistreated. (I have been to the Holy Land just where Jesus was questioned by Pilate). Let's not be left out of this mystery: let's not wash ourselves, our hands too. We are guilty of their suffering.

See that no one like the Pharisees heard harsher words. We have the danger of remaining in the images, the customs of each day, etc... but we have to go further, penetrate deeper, we must not remain on the surface, in the tradition, in the typical, remain at the door without entering in the attitude before the mystery and the message of the Passion of the Lord.

O Lord, I sinned, have mercy and mercy on me!

-   

Veracruz procession.

It is a great achievement of the Pro-Semana Santa Board that last year 2010 managed to recover. We know that he was in procession on the night of Holy Thursday; the brotherhoods were of two kinds: light, and blood, or, of discipline. Dressed in tunic or white shirt and capirote or hoods; carrying a candle those of light and disciplining the seconds during the procession. It is also known that in the year 1717 there were 45 female cofrades, although what type is not specified. After the procession, a snack consisting of cakes and wine (la parva) was taken. This brotherhood stopped processioning around the year 1880.

Reflection: But are we going to contemplate Christ on the cross without anything happening inside us? without our deciding to put into practice the demands of brotherly love? Without deepening in us the value of the Eucharist? Do you understand now, Lord, why, like Peter, we tell you not to go up to the cross?

Holy Friday

-   Procession of the Encounter: Jesús Nazareno, María and San Juan parade.

-   Holy Offices of the Lord's Death.

-   Procession of the Holy Burial: with Las Angustias, La Urna, and Virgen de los Dolores

 “Today, on Good Friday, the Cross of Jesus is the center of everything. With pain, but even more with admiration and gratitude, we approach Him and affirm our faith in Him because from the cross of Jesus, from His immense love, springs inexhaustible life for all humanity.

       I want to tell you: Blessed are you:

-   Those of you who see the processions of Holy Week in our town and make it come alive,

-   those who wear the penitential robe and have a penitential tune in the heart;

-   those of you who carry the “steps” and offer your strength and your sweat as a penance that purifies and redeems. And you pray.

-   Blessed if, in addition to joining the death of Christ, you rise with Him to a new life in the Paschal joy of Alleluia.

-   

Holy Saturday day of silence . Next to the tomb of Jesus we feel the pain of the Master's death, the pain of all the deaths in the world. But, at the same time, we trust in the strength of God: the grain of wheat, buried in the ground, will bear much fruit.

Procession with Soledad at night.

You go only women, surely many mothers. Look closely… Maria is alone. Today we cannot look at the Eucharist (there is no mass), nor at the cross, we look at Mary who is alone. It may be that she is materially accompanied by one of the women, or perhaps by Juan who was to take her to her house. But, even if she was accompanied by her, María is alone, it is such a great emptiness that she has due to the death of her son that nothing and no one can fill it. Mothers who have lost a child can understand it but there will always be a very big difference and an unattainable distance given the quality of this SON and the sensitivity of this mother .

We approach her with respect and we are not going to say anything to her. We just want to be and share.

To the SOLITUDE of MARY   by Jacinto Fuerte Trabadillo

The procession of my town

 What I liked the most

And that I always remember her

Maria in her solitude.

 

Procession that I had not seen

Mourning, sadness, crying;

Weeping in the Mother of Christ,

I love his piety.

 

penance procession,

Women with faith and with light,

They light up and pray to him

To the Mother of Jesus.

 

They link songs and prayers

With faith and true love,

And look at that mother

Who cries in his loneliness.

 

With my children I followed her

through the nearest streets,

I looked at her with faith,

My children gave him kisses.

 

I felt more penitent

I found myself more sinful,

The sad echo reached me:

"Cry the mother of my love."

 

Mary's loneliness

It filled me with pain

My mother cried

I have never seen greater grief!

……….

I got tired of walking

Along stubble trails

and i backtracked

With tears in the eyes

……………

I was alone and I felt sorry,

could not accompany

To my mother, the best,

Crying in his loneliness.

 

Christ gave us his Mother

In the person of John

That's why today your children

We will accompany her.

 

pondering the mysteries

of sorrow and love,

I thought to help the Virgin

going in the procession.

                    +++