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A festive procession followed by high Mass celebrate the Santo Niño, the child Jesus, in Bustos, Bulacan on the third Sunday of January. Though not as large as the celebrations in Cebu and Malolos, the joyful feast in Bustos is important to local residents.

Outside the basilica year-round, tig sinulog women in yellow blouses and red skirts sell candles and pray to the Santo Niño on behalf of others, taking on the roles of “the spirit medium, the benign counselor, the friend, the grandmother, the servant, the withdrawn laborer.”

Every January in the central Philippines city of Cebu, 1.5 to 3 million people gather for a series of Masses, parades, water and land processions, beauty contests, street dances and concerts, fireworks and other events that celebrate the feast of the Santo Niño — the Holy Child — of Cebu. Drawing visitors from throughout the region, the city doubles in size for the celebration, which is the biggest event of the year in Cebu. The feast, known today as Sinulog, extends more than two weeks, culminating on the weekend of the third Sunday of January, and is one of the most well attended Catholic

Ronda, an ancient striking hilltop city of just under 35,000 people in Andalucia, in the south of Spain, has its own tradition of Holy Week processions marking the Passion of Jesus, dating back to the mid-16th century, less than 100 years after the city was recaptured from Muslim control. Though not carried out on as grand a scale as in Seville , the Holy Week processions are, given the proportionate sizes of the cities, as significant as in Seville. Ronda even has its own stylistic “school” of design for the images and pasos , the elaborate, carried platforms that bear the images. In 2016

Confraternities are extraordinarily important in the life of the Church in Seville. There are nearly 600 canonically recognized confraternities and brotherhoods in the Diocese of Seville. Seventy-three of these are Penitential confraternities that process in the city of Seville during Holy Week, or in the days before it.

Two forms of music, marches and saetas — musical forms that are not, in other parts of the world, readily associated with Catholic religious music — are integral parts of Semana Santa processions in Seville.

Holy Week processions in Seville show a quite explicitly gendered form of religiosity, one that repeatedly allows for displays of masculinity even in a society that has become much more egalitarian, and in confraternities that today are open to men and women.

Semana Santa processions are unparalleled in Seville, where 60 official processions traverse the center city throughout Holy Week from afternoon deep into the night.

In many cities in Spain, and elsewhere in the Iberian-influenced world, Semana Santa — Holy Week — is marked by major public processions that recount and ritualize the events of the Passion, providing a visual catechism and giving the masses a chance to participate in the story.

Filipinos participate in religious events as families, often as extended families. More often than not, the family is the unit of analysis.