Kanrei-sha

The Penitent is the name given to an unidentified man who repeatedly desecrates churches in Santa Teresa. Initially known through a series of disturbing incidents and later dubbed the Demon Penitent by a reporter, he becomes the focus of Inspector Juan de Dios Martinez’s tentative theory that the attacks express a pathological fear or hatred of sacred objects. The name offers the city a figure to discuss, but it does not solve the mystery: the man is never identified in the available account, and the crimes associated with him shift from desecration to lethal violence.

Identity and the first attack

The Penitent’s first reported appearance is at the church of San Rafael during an early service. He sits alone near the back, appears distressed, and repeatedly urinates inside the church. When the sexton and priest approach to remove him, he produces a blade and attacks the sexton, who survives. The scene gives the figure his defining contradiction: he seems to be in crisis, yet the danger to others is immediate. The narrative does not establish his name, history, or precise motive.

Descriptions differ according to who is looking. The priest and the sexton describe an ordinary-looking Mexican man, while elderly parishioners interpret him as the devil. Juan de Dios Martinez records the witnesses’ accounts and seeks a possible match among patients at the Santa Teresa asylum. The institution has two men who fit parts of his description, but neither is considered violent. This inquiry produces possibilities, not identification, and the gap between a witness description, a supernatural interpretation, and an institutional category remains open.

A pattern of desecration

That same night, the man appears at San Tadeo in Colonia Kino. He sits at the back of the church, where an elderly woman hears him crying; after she calls the priest, he damages statues of Christ, the Virgin of Guadalupe, and other saints, then leaves. No one is injured. The repeated elements—the rear pew, apparent distress, and bodily disorder—connect the incident to San Rafael, while the change in outcome suggests that the attacks do not follow a simple escalation from one episode to the next.

Two days later, he enters the closed church of Santa Catalina in Colonia Lomas del Toro. There he defaces the altar, damages nearly all the statues in his path, and urinates and defecates inside the building. The incident becomes national news, and a reporter names the attacker the Demon Penitent. The press label gives the scattered attacks a memorable identity, although it says nothing reliable about the man himself. The church’s priest treats the physical damage as inexpensive to repair; the episode’s public significance comes instead from the breach of sacred space and the emerging pattern.

Juan de Dios Martinez’s investigation

Juan de Dios Martinez tries to distinguish the attacker’s conduct from an intention to kill. After the first attack, he asks whether asylum patients matching the description can be brought to the hospital for identification. The director refuses to release them without a court order. Later, the inspector learns that both patients remained asleep at the asylum during the night of the San Tadeo incident, with no signs that they had gone out. The check removes those two men as suspects in that episode but does not reveal who the attacker is.

As the attacks continue, Juan de Dios Martinez develops a practical theory about the man’s movements. After the later, lethal church attack, he argues that the Penitent probably has a car: the churches lie far apart, and the odor associated with the incidents would make long journeys on foot conspicuous. He suggests that the attacker may carry a change of clothes and behave ordinarily outside the churches, becoming violent only within them. These are investigative inferences, not confirmed facts, and they leave the central question of identity unanswered.

In an off-the-record conversation with journalist Sergio Gonzalez, the inspector calls the Penitent sick and names the condition as sacraphobia. He defines it as fear and hatred of sacred objects, particularly those belonging to one’s own religion, and says that the man attacks church images to vent rage rather than with a premeditated intention to kill. The asylum director, Elvira Campos, agrees that the term describes fear or hatred of the sacred but has found no matching case history in the institution’s archives. The diagnosis therefore functions as a proposed explanation, not a verified clinical finding or a demonstrated biography.

Violence, naming, and uncertainty

The pattern changes when the Penitent attacks another church and kills two people: Father Carrasco and the caretaker. Inspector Jose Marquez calls the attack a frenzy. At the scene, Juan de Dios Martinez continues to reason from the locations and apparent travel distances, while the police chief and Epifanio consider his suggestion that the attacker uses a car. The discussion turns a frightening, apparently senseless series into a set of testable practical questions, but no arrest or identification follows in the available account.

The Penitent’s public identity rests on competing descriptions and explanations. Witnesses see distress, disorder, or a figure they interpret as evil; the police examine routes, access, and possible suspects; the inspector proposes sacraphobia; a reporter supplies a dramatic title. None of these accounts fully explains the man. The narrative’s restraint around his identity keeps the label from becoming an answer: the Demon Penitent remains a name attached to a pattern of attacks, while motive, personal history, and ultimate fate remain unresolved.

Narrative significance

The church attacks form a distinct strand within a city where violence against women is also being reported, investigated, and repeatedly left unresolved. The cases are not presented as the same crime, and the Penitent is not identified as responsible for the killings of women. Their juxtaposition nevertheless exposes how public attention organizes violence into separate stories: the Penitent’s acts acquire a memorable name and a proposed psychological explanation, while the killings of women are described through accumulating reports, uncertain counts, and incomplete identifications.

The episode also shows how naming can provide the appearance of knowledge without delivering it. “The Penitent” and “Demon Penitent” make the attacker narratable, while sacraphobia offers a theory that can be repeated by investigators and journalists. Yet neither the title nor the diagnosis establishes who the man is, why he acts, or whether the explanation accounts for the deaths. The unresolved distance between a legible label and an unidentified person is central to the figure’s role in the novel.