Saturday, April 16, 2022

Stations of the Cross Procession on South Main Street 4/15/22

 

Waterbury, Connecticut

I'd spent the early afternoon yesterday seeing if I could get some interesting pictures from the early spring flowering trees in Naugatuck, then moved up to Waterbury. After I'd left my car in a strip mall, walking a bit east, I heard strange amplified music or voices, and turning a corner saw rotating blue cop car lights at the block away intersection, stopping traffic exiting the highway. I walked faster that way. After a bit, I realized that hundreds of people were walking down the right side of South Main Street. Near the front of the column, a pickup truck had enormous five foot tall speakers in the bed, deafeningly projecting the procession's readers of the ritual words for each of the Roman Catholic Stations of the Cross liturgy. Each station was determined, as far as I could see, by an abstract interval of progress down the city street. Each station recitation, in whichever language, was followed with call and response from the crowd for the major prayers, the Hail Mary and the Our Father (known to Protestants as The Lord's Prayer). All of this, all heading for the enormous church of St. Anne's, alternated between Spanish and English. It made me think that I might be the only one there who didn't understand both.

I followed the crowd into the the large church, and might have more pictures.


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