Women take pride in Holy Week roles after a Spanish Catholic brotherhood's procession excluded them

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MONTORO, Spain (AP) — One religious brotherhood’s refusal to include women in its Holy Week procession has made front-page news in Spain, whose Easter-time festivities dating back centuries are among the most fervently celebrated in the world.

The exclusion is the exception in the Catholic processions that have been unfolding across the country. They vary from hourslong versions that attract tens of thousands of faithful and tourists in major cities like Seville to village affairs that speak more intimately to family and tradition.

There was indignation at the controversy unfolding in Sagunto, where a majority of the Puríssima Sang de Nostre Senyor Jesucrist brotherhood’s members voted to exclude women and said their decision was based on “respect for tradition.” The news triggered protests from the government as well as in the streets.

Holy Week processions in Spain are elaborate affairs that take months to prepare, peaking in the early hours of Good Friday, one of the most solemn days.

Brotherhoods organize the groups that for hours carry the heavy floats with statues, sometimes up to half a dozen of them representing scenes from the Gospels' accounts of Jesus’ passion and death, like Judas’ betraying kiss on the Mount of Olives.

Women are sometimes “portadoras,” carrying the floats on their shoulders.

In Baena, a hilltop hamlet of whitewashed homes among Andalusia’s olive groves, eyelashes lushly covered in mascara were seen through the purple hoods of women carrying a flower-decked float with a statue of Jesus in prayer.

In Montoro, another village in the same province of Córdoba, a member of a local brotherhood said men and women should have equal roles, especially since the sacred images carried in procession include both the Virgin Mary and Jesus.

“In my house I have three daughters, with my wife that's four, and with me we're five — and the whole family takes part,” added Ricardo Ruano, who on Holy Thursday was a “costalero,” one of the robed people carrying large floats on the base of their neck. “We wait for this the whole year, because it's our favorite.”

Several “portadoras” in Montoro said they were indignant at the controversy in Sagunto.

“We as women have the same right as a man to go out in the procession,” said one, Rosa de la Cruz. “We don’t go in a procession so that people look at us, we participate so that they see the image.”

Many in the village devoted their Holy Week prayers to the victims of a devastating train accident outside a nearby town that killed nearly four dozen people in January.

Even as Spain, like most of Europe, is increasingly secular, interest keeps growing in participating in procession roles, said Juan Carlos González Faraco, a University of Huelva professor. He has studied religious traditions in Andalusia, including the El Rocío pilgrimage at the end of the Easter season.

Historically male, brotherhoods have been including women in both leadership and processional roles for decades, he added. That’s especially true in the lines of often hooded “penitents” who march alongside the floats, though some of the heaviest floats are still carried only by men.

In Montoro, Mari Carmen Lopez said physical strength might vary, but men and women share the same feeling.

“We go with faith, with devotion, with all our hearts,” she said as her brotherhood’s float made its way through the village’s uphill alleys. Men who disregard that, she added, “don’t realize they were born of a woman.”

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Dell'Orto reported from Miami.

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