Westfield High School student Gabriel Cruz, foreground, plays Jesus in the annual Way of the Cross ceremony Friday. (Photo by chief photographer Frederick Gore)
WESTFIELD – Every spring, billions of people worldwide celebrate the most important holiday in the Catholic Church, Easter Sunday.
However, Good Friday, the last Friday before Easter, is also a day full of holy tradition all across the globe. Of these traditions, one of the most important is the Stations of the Cross.
Good Friday celebrations for many Hispanic Catholic communities often consists of the Stations of the Cross as a live demonstration in which parishioners portray the figures involved in the crucifixion of Jesus Christ.
Often a march through the streets of the city or town that serves as home to the parish hosting the event, the traditional fourteen Stations of the Cross start with Jesus being condemned to death and culminate with his crucifixion on the cross and his burial in the tomb in the fourteenth station.
For more than four decades, the city of Westfield has hosted its own Stations of the Cross ceremony, beginning and ending at the steps of Saint Mary’s Parish on Bartlett Street. Originally the brainchild of Puerto Rican immigrants to the Whip City, the reenactment has become a citywide event that has grown a larger following year-to-year.
When Victor Franco, Pablo Lopez and the late Emilio Luna began one of the most beloved Catholic traditions in Westfield, it had humble beginnings. With the help of Olga Gonzalez, a relative of Luna, who was employed by then-Mayor, the late John J. Palczynski, the ceremony was approved and ready to go. However, Franco, Lopez and Luna couldn’t have imagined their local homage to the Good Friday ritual of their homeland would still be going strong in 2013.
At around 2 p.m. Friday, the assembled masses outside the church grew rapidly, swelling to almost 300 people, by the time Gabriel Cruz, Luna’s grandson, donned the crown of thorns and began his march as Jesus. Following a Chevrolet with a public address system announcing the stations as they occurred, Cruz fell three times, was visited by Simon, met his mother Mary, and was hung on the cross inside the church.
It was a scene so poignant and sad that even non-Catholic bystanders began to come outside their homes and either march or gaze on in wonderment. This is an occurrence that Pedro Rivera, a Deacon at Saint Mary’s, doesn’t find out of the ordinary at all.
“The march is open to anyone, whether or not they are Catholic or of Latino descent,” Rivera said before mentioning Westfield’s large Russian population, who has long supported the event despite a large majority of them not practicing Catholicism, “the march brings this community together more and more every year.”
One topic of conversation that separated this year’s ceremony from all the previous events was the recent selection of an Argentine Pope, Francis I, who succeeded the retired Pope Benedict XVI earlier this month. As the first Pope from Latin America, Rivera believes that the arrival of Pope Francis I will reignite the community’s passions and involvement, especially a congregation with as many Latino groups as Saint Mary’s, with many parishioners of Puerto Rican, Dominican, Mexican and Colombian backgrounds.
“It’s like a dream come true,” Rivera said of the first Latino Pope, “However, even if he wasn’t Latino, his character and connectedness to people makes him the right man for the job. But for us (Latinos), to have a Pope coming from our heritage, it’s absolutely awesome.”
Many men and women who make the event possible have been doing it for years.
“I’ve been doing this for over twelve years now,” said Junior Delgado, the Director of Career Services at Westfield State University, who portrayed a soldier during the reenactment, “We’ve done this in snow, rain, wind – you name it.”
Delgado was also quick to mention and credit the amount of young people involved in the procession, knowing that the event will continue to go strong as long as the kids continue to participate.
Fellow parishioners who didn’t participate in the reenactment themselves still found ways to make their contributions to the event, such as Luna’s son David, who recorded the ceremony on a digital camcorder from start to finish as his nephew Gabriel portrayed Jesus.
“My father (Emilio) was the first Pontius Pilate, I was the first John, and now we have another generation of the family involved,” Luna said as he put his arm around Cruz, a student at Westfield High School. While only having been in the States for two years (Cruz immigrated to Massachusetts from Yabucoa, Puerto Rico), he points out that there are great similarities between the event in Westfield and marches in Puerto Rico.
“It’s basically the same,” Cruz said with a smile.
