For 40 years Sydney’s best-kept Holy Week secret has been hiding in plain sight in Our Lady of Victories parish in Horsley Park.
It is a Maltese-inspired procession of life-size scenes from the Passion of Jesus Christ with some 200 volunteers dressed as Roman soldiers and characters from the Gospel.
In a baroque flourish drawn from mediaeval Spanish processions, the men bearing these tableaux on processional platforms are garbed in white robes, cinctures and white headscarves.
Three white-robed men are hooded and walk barefoot dragging bundles of chains tied to their ankles. In times gone by in Malta, they were called penitenti, penitents, and they were expiating their sins with this ostentatious display of penance.
It’s an amazing spectacle – and it has been carried out every year in Horsley Park in western Sydney since 1986. This year, the organisers anticipate that about a thousand spectators will follow Christ as He moves through the quiet back streets.
The procession begins to unfold three weeks before Easter. Eight of the heavy tableaux are carefully and laboriously taken out of storage in the basement and placed in the church, three on one side, and four on the other. In the front is the scene of the death of Jesus.
On Good Friday, the parish celebrates the liturgical Passion of Our Lord at 1pm; at 3pm the procession begins, accompanied by the music of a 30-piece brass band. It winds its way along the church driveway, onto Horsley Drive, then onto Felton Street and back to the church – about two hours in all.
It takes eight to 12 strong men to carry the ornate platforms, or predelle, with the statues; most of them have been imported from Malta over the years. Amongst the participants are menacing Roman legionaries bearing symbols of Imperial might, Apostles, Jewish leaders, and primary school children carrying symbols of the Passion.
Between each of the scenes someone carries a huge embroidered banner with one of the seven last words of Christ on the Cross.
As the shadows lengthen, with the late afternoon sun setting behind the procession, it is transfigured into a stunning tribute to southern European piety.
The president of the parish’s Good Friday committee, Alfred Cauchi, told The Catholic Weekly that he had been involved for 30 years. Back in 1996 a mate asked him to help out. Shortly thereafter he was diagnosed with Hodgkins Lymphoma and was cured. In gratitude, he pitched in the next year, and the next … and the next.
An immense amount of work is required and often there just don’t seem to be enough hands to pull it off. But, says Cauchi, “we always find people in the last minute. Sometimes it has been a bit of hard work, but we get there all the time.”
For decades Horsley Park has been a heavily Maltese and Italian neighbourhood, but nowadays a good number of people from other ethnic backgrounds participate. On the two small islands of Malta, every parish has its own procession along the narrow mediaeval streets – gigantic affairs which attract many tourists.
The work isn’t over on the evening of Good Friday. The eight scenes of the Passion are stored away and on Holy Saturday the ninth tableau – the Resurrection – moves up into the church. “He’s not dead anymore,” Cauchi says with great satisfaction. “He’s gonna wake up.”
