Constitutions
Preliminary
"Product of the Christian charity that must preside over the reciprocal relations between Catholics and their institutions, and which, in fact, characterize the mutual and cordial benevolence traditionally matched in Murcia with the typical, devotional and penitential Processional Passionary Brotherhoods, adornment of its Holy Week, so exemplary and celebrated by all and sundry, a group of their presidents has been acting for years under the name of SUPERIOR CHAPTER OF PASSIONARY BROTHERHOODS OF THE CITY OF MURCIA, whose existence has created lots of advantages for themselves and, in many occasions, has been able to appear in public, in the name of those brotherhoods, before authorities, corporations, institutions and even the crowd, with a generally recognized authority and unanimous approval.
Indisputably, it looks as if every society, no matter how small, and in order to own the distinctive and characteristic elements of its state, demands a substantive form, which is no other than the authority, symbolized in the governing constituent rules, that are suitable for delimiting its field of activities, the Corporation powers and the rights and duties of those who make it up, and for limiting, in short, the respective areas in whole and in part, with the aim of obtaining the social purposes in the best way, with the greatest security and optimum result, and with no detriment nor damage for anybody, within the highest logical precision, harmonizing the variety with the unity". (From the Constitutions of the Superior Chapter of Brotherhoods from 1947).
On the 18th of February 1967 the final touches to the original statutes from 1947 were put, adapting them to a new configuration of the Superior Chapter of Brotherhoods, more appropriate for the growth experienced in the number of passionary entities over the 20 years that had passed. This regulation is once again object of revision in 2001, in order to adapt the functions and structure of the representative board of the Murcian passionary brotherhoods to the religious and social reality of the times we live in, to a Holy Week with ten days, fifteen brotherhoods and sixteen processions, to the dictates of the Diocesan Directory of Fraternities and Brotherhoods and other ecclesiastical laws and, in short, to what the Diocese of Cartagena expects from the religious brotherhoods and fraternities of the 21st century.
