No one remembers, since the Nazarene memory is always enthralled with the first orange blossoms of spring, the precise moment in which it happened. The legend begins to make its way. They say that it happened twenty-five years ago, twenty-five springs with its sorrows and joys, its terrible pandemic and many rains in between.
But few doubt that it was then that the Capuchin Christ lowered his blue eyes and implored: “I also want to go out into the street.” Witnesses of this were Juan de Dios Rogel and brother Cayetano Martínez one afternoon in 1998 while they contemplated such a splendid carving. “It would be worth going out in a procession,” they concluded.
Another version maintains that the scene occurred over coffee in a bar in La Redonda, accompanied by teachers Ana Pérez and Marta Riosalido. Be that as it may, all the teachers of the San Buenaventura school, their students and families, to please their Lord, joined the idea and this frailuno procession that since then has lorded over the brotherly heart of Murcia.
The procession begins with the traditional raising and lowering of the Christ of Faith, tied by two ropes to its wood and so many words also tied with emotion to the throat, along the very façade of the temple to cross La Redonda on the throne, where the Few remaining palm trees glimpse their sharp leaves and the fading afternoon sun. They are the first games of light and shadows on the way to Belluga.
They called him Christ of Faith, since the Christs of Hope and Charity already reigned during Holy Week in Murcia. Therefore, the third supernatural virtue was missing. Three or three are the knocks that the door of the temple receives to announce the procession.
And Murcia, at the proposal of the remembered priest Don Luis Martínez, who cannot be cited without his gift or his eternal cassock and the you with which he addressed everyone, knew how to complete the list with elegance and fervor. At the beginning of the century, on April 15, the first procession was held from San Francisco de Asís.
The Capuchin procession advances in rigorous silence. Silence that seems to extend, between aromas of incense and intoned motets, to all the Murcians who come across, so many times without expecting it, with the solemnity and gathering of brown tunics with frailuno girdles. Or with the look at the sky of the Christ that Antonio Fernández Dorrego carved just seventy years ago. Another anniversary to remember.
In this fruitful time another valuable Franciscan pillar would be added: María Santísima de los Ángeles, that splendid piece by Yuste Navarro that, even from its first appearance, seemed to many that it had always processed with the Faith. And it is very possible, given the vitality and the good taste of the institution in organizing its penitence station, which in another 25 years will continue to fill the city of Murcia with fervor every Holy Saturday at dusk in La Redonda.
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