Catholic doctrine and the “misuse” of the body

Catholic doctrine and the “misuse” of the body is a governing idea in Elena Knows: the belief that the body belongs to God turns questions of suicide, abortion, and euthanasia into questions of moral authority over women’s lives. The novel examines not only the doctrine itself but also how people selectively live by it, impose it on others, and challenge its claim to define what their bodies may mean.

Doctrine and bodily ownership

Father Juan explains the Church’s position to Elena by grouping suicide with abortion and euthanasia as wrongful uses of a body that does not belong to its human occupant. In his account, a person may use the body but does not have the right to decide its ultimate purpose or end. He treats Rita’s death as an unequivocal act of sin and urges Elena to grieve, pray for Rita, and accept the Church’s judgment.

Elena refuses that consoling framework. She wants an earthly investigation into how Rita came to die, not a judgment deferred to the afterlife, and objects when Father Juan interprets her persistence as pride. Her own Parkinson’s disease makes his language of bodily use especially fraught: she argues that illness, not God, has taken away her control over her body. The dispute exposes a conflict between an abstract doctrine of divine ownership and the daily reality of a body that no longer reliably obeys its owner.

Ritual, belief, and everyday practice

Religious observance in the novel is not a simple measure of belief. Rita wears a cross and follows many practices: she visits seven churches on Good Friday, fasts on that day and other Lenten observances, avoids entering a church with uncovered shoulders, and observes the required interval before communion. Yet she skips Mass when it rains because she fears lightning, sometimes does not confess or pray, and has her own understanding of God. Her faith is assembled from ritual, tradition, fear, and personal rules rather than strict consistency with doctrine.

Elena, by contrast, has concealed her disbelief in the soul and eternal life from Antonio, her practicing-Catholic husband, who worked at a Catholic school as both porter and theology teacher. She nevertheless carries the language and habits of Catholic life in her memory. The distinction between belief and practice becomes visible when Rita’s body is found in the church belfry: Father Juan arranges for the seven o’clock Mass to proceed before the police investigation interrupts it. On Corpus Christi, parishioners attend without knowing that Rita’s body is above them, while the rain falls in the courtyard. The ritual continues even as the circumstances surrounding death remain unresolved.

Doctrine imposed on another woman

The sharpest consequence of Rita’s convictions appears in her encounter with Isabel. Twenty years before Elena’s journey, Rita finds Isabel ill on the street while Isabel is on her way to seek an abortion. Rita argues that the pregnancy is a child and that ending it would be a sin; she invokes motherhood and religious duty even as Isabel says she does not want to become a mother. Rita then takes Isabel to her own home rather than allowing her to continue toward the abortion.

The intervention becomes part of a larger pattern of control. Isabel later explains that her husband had forced the pregnancy on her and that, after she tried to refuse motherhood, he and others confined and sedated her during the pregnancy. The novel thus places Rita’s religiously motivated intervention alongside the power exercised by Isabel’s husband and the medical arrangements around her. Isabel’s experience is not presented as an abstract disagreement about doctrine: the consequences of other people’s decisions persist in her marriage and in her relationship to motherhood. Rita, who is not a mother and will never become one, uses the doctrine she has inherited to compel another woman into that role.

Contradictions and the novel’s critique

The novel also complicates any easy division between religious doctrine and bodily control. Rita’s intervention is an act of conviction, but it denies Isabel’s authority over her own pregnancy. In turn, Rita’s body is later subjected to a medical examination initiated by Elena and the medical establishment to determine whether she has a womb and is fit for a presumed female purpose. Elena, who resists Father Juan’s account of divine ownership, also intends to use Isabel’s healthier body to pursue her investigation into Rita’s death. The pressure to treat women’s bodies as available for others’ purposes therefore reaches beyond the Church’s explicit teaching.

When Elena confronts Father Juan, she rejects his authority to settle the meaning of Rita’s death through doctrine alone. Her final exchange with him turns on the name available to a woman whose only child has died: she questions whether she remains a mother and refuses a label that might take away her right to decide how to live or die. The novel’s critique is not limited to a dispute over religious belief. It asks who has the power to interpret a body, to define motherhood, and to make decisions in the name of God, family, medicine, or love. Its account of Catholic doctrine gains force from the gap between universal moral rules and the constrained, unequal circumstances in which women must live with their consequences.