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Good Morning Manchester likes its parades. From St Patrick’s Day to Pride weekend, from victorious sporting teams to solemn November processions of service personnel and military veterans, the city rarely goes many weeks without some significant march adorning its streets. The Covid years took their toll but later this morning the first City Centre Whit Walks since 2019 will wind their way from my Cathedral to St Peter’s Square, reviving a tradition I vividly recall from my earliest childhood. Whitsun commemorates when Jesus’s first followers, filled with God’s Spirit, made public proclamation of their faith in the Jesus who had, seven weeks earlier, risen from the dead. Now, as then, those parts of Greater Manchester who walk, may do so on different days of Whit Week, but the pattern of procession, following large banners depicting the name of each church, converging on some central spot for an outdoor ecumenical service, varies little. Whit Parades are not protests. They bring no demands or denunciations. Rather they are public expressions of solidarity and shared belonging, both among those who march and those who stand cheering as they pass. Where parades may prove challenging is when some are perceived as asserting a belonging that others contest. I suspect that some marches in Northern Ireland prove particularly contentious because their traditional routes take them through areas over which others assert ownership, whilst their timing reflects past conflict experienced as victory or defeat by different sectors of the same city. Our sense of belonging runs deep, and if others seek to refute it, telling us we don’t belong, that hurts. At their best, parades welcome others to join. I was deeply touched when invited to join a local mosque for their annual parade, and delighted when I found my Roman Catholic colleague had also accepted. Clad in our cassocks, we were not pretending to be anything other than Christian bishops, but bishops who supported the presence of our Muslim friends, in the city we all call home. Manchester’s Whit Walks may not match the flamboyance of processions on religious festivals like a Latin American Mardi Gras, but they matter. They matter because they affirm the right for faith to be seen and heard in the public square. They remind us that religion is not just something people practice in private, in homes and places of worship, but the foundation of how so many of us order our lives, both individually and in the diverse communities to which we belong. To parade, behind a church banner, along the same street I may walk next day, hurrying to some business meeting, means much to me. And I think it means something to Manchester.