The director of Canal Sur Radio, Juan Miguel Vega (Seville, 1962), will be in charge of proclaiming Holy Week in Seville 2024 this Sunday at the Teatro de la Maestranza. Brother of Saint Bernard and Love, he already stated that the true proclamation is the “heterodox” one. His announcement of the Week of God will come almost three months after the death of Antonio Burgostown crier in 2008 and chronicler of the city, of all its corners, of its heritage, of all its customs and of the “Gospel of Seville.”
The proclamation, which was titled The days of joy and was interrupted by applause and olés up to 28 times, he started it with that «Are you on?» that the brotherly and Marian people of Seville continue to remember every year: «Are you standing, thistles and ivies of the Dog, telling us that death is not the end even of Holy Week, because you proclaim the triumph of the Holy Cross in the Jerusalem of Seville? Look what I’m going to call… Look what I’m going to call with the bronze bells of the Giralda… All of you equally, brave…! All of you equally brave witnesses and prophets of our faith according to the Gospel of Seville! Seville a dream rises… To Heaven with this heaven called Holy Week!
On his tour he recalled the “penitential” Holy Week of the hospitals – “when you are hearing the tinkling of some canopy falls, an inexorable clock of time that devours us, think, Sevillians, in these silences of penance of the immense pain of the hospital” – and came to the guiding cross lantern, an article written in memory of his father.
In front of the then socialist mayor Alfredo Sánchez Monteseirínlaunched an unforgettable plea against euthanasia, “that form of murder«; against abortion, “that way of death penalty con crusher«; against relativism, «that has erased the borders between good and evil«; and against the secularism “of a society that denies all moral and ethical values and principles, and mocks religion, and despises it, and marginalizes it in schools…”.
«In a Spain that questions the tradition of its faithSeville, going out en masse into the street to see their brotherhoods, getting emotional before a Crucified (…), simply saying a wordless prayer to a Virgin in tears… In these unlearned rites that we carry in the mass of blood, The common and sovereign people of Seville collectively proclaim the feeling and emotion of their faith“, the familiar closeness of the divine,” concluded Antonio Burgos.
Antonio Burgos also dedicated a poetic piece in the hands of the Great Power (“People kiss their hands, / a golden cord ties them: / hands that move the world”) and a memorable poem to La Macarena, his Virgin of Hope: «I was going to look at you… and I can’t: / who can stand that look at you? / That one cannot bear / the beauty of your face… / As they have told you everything, / my silence is what speaks, / well you will see, Girl of the Arch, / that there is a lump in my throat. / And I only say your name, / that which reaches everything, / as Seville names you, / as your neighborhood calls you, / like an old Macareno: / my Virgin of Hope!