[URBAN NOTE] A Good Friday Procession
Mar. 25th, 2005 08:28 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rfmcdonaldI find it mildly amusing that, in the three months that I've been dating the boyfriend, I've attended more Mass and other religious functions than I had in the previous three years. At least, I find it more amusing that while I was standing on College Street, east of Ossington in the heart of Little Italy, waiting for St. Francis of Assisi Church's Good Friday Via Dolorosa procession, I saw a poster advertising the similarly blood-obsessed Istvan Kantor (this one) plastered on a traffic metre.
It was an interesting event to watch, not only from the religious point of view. The participants in the procession circled a significant chunk of Little Italy, beginning and ending with St. Francis of Assisi Church, engaging in a Certeau-like inscription of religious faith onto the grey cold urban geography of west-central downtown Toronto. Participation was organized around confraternities and social clubs, each apparently organized around villages, towns or districts of origin for the first generation of Toronto's Italian-Canadians. One Italian artwork, apparently imported to Canada by an Italian government ministry concerned with the diaspora, was led down the street. There were possible signs that the procession was failing to serve as a bastion for Italian-Canadian group solidarity past the first generation.
It was an interesting event to watch, not only from the religious point of view. The participants in the procession circled a significant chunk of Little Italy, beginning and ending with St. Francis of Assisi Church, engaging in a Certeau-like inscription of religious faith onto the grey cold urban geography of west-central downtown Toronto. Participation was organized around confraternities and social clubs, each apparently organized around villages, towns or districts of origin for the first generation of Toronto's Italian-Canadians. One Italian artwork, apparently imported to Canada by an Italian government ministry concerned with the diaspora, was led down the street. There were possible signs that the procession was failing to serve as a bastion for Italian-Canadian group solidarity past the first generation.
- The procession included one Portuguese confraternity
- Most of the signage was in the English language.
- Most of the participants were at least middle-aged, though this might just mean that marching positions are reserved for the aged.
