The Cathedral of Seville has hosted, as it does every August, the novena in honor of the Virgen de los Reyes, patroness of the city and the archdiocese: nine days of Masses and preaching that prepare for the solemnity of the Assumption on August 15, when the image processes around the Cathedral before thousands of Sevillians. This year, on the 80th anniversary of the proclamation of her patronage, the preacher was the Archbishop of Panama, Monsignor José Domingo Ulloa, who on Friday brought the novena to a close with the final Mass.
Monsignor Ulloa confessed that living these days in the Seville Cathedral holds for him “a meaning that surpasses words.” He does not feel like a foreigner in Seville, he said, but rather like “a son who has come to give thanks at the house where some of the first pages of his family’s history in the faith began to be written.”
Homage to the Evangelizers of America
The Panamanian archbishop paid tribute to those who, more than five centuries ago, departed from Seville “moved by the desire to proclaim Jesus Christ”: “They descended the Guadalquivir, crossed the ocean, and brought to our lands the greatest treasure the Church can offer: the Gospel.” That history, he acknowledged, had “limits, contradictions, and shadows,” but “we also cannot fail to recognize, with gratitude, the dedication of so many evangelizers who left everything to sow the faith.”
He recalled that on September 9, 1513, the Diocese of Santa María la Antigua del Darién, the first in Tierra Firme on the American continent, was established, and he highlighted the bond that has united both shores ever since:
“Here in Seville, a people walked under the gaze of Our Lady of the Kings. On the other side of the ocean, a Church began to invoke Santa María la Antigua. Two distinct advocations, but one single Mother. Two Churches, but one same faith.”
For this reason, he thanked that “this Church of Seville did not keep the treasure it received for itself,” although he warned that the mission “does not belong only to the past: it remains alive and now passes through our hands.”
He concluded by asking that “none of us return home exactly the same as when we arrived” and that faith “not remain locked inside the temple, but become a living presence in the midst of the world.” This Saturday, the solemnity of the Assumption, the Virgen de los Reyes will, as every year, walk the streets surrounding the Cathedral in her traditional procession at eight in the morning.