the Church

The Church in Elena Knows is at once a place of communal worship and a source of moral language through which characters interpret death, bodily autonomy, and motherhood. Its doctrines enter private relationships as well as public ritual: Father Juan invokes them in his conversations with Elena, while Rita carries a personally assembled form of religious practice into her encounter with Isabel. The novel distinguishes the Church’s formal claims from the varied ways people live, adapt, and contest them.

Doctrine, the Body, and Elena’s Challenge

Father Juan presents the Church as condemning suicide, abortion, and euthanasia because the human body belongs to God and people have only the right to use it. He interprets Rita’s death through that doctrine, describing it as a wrongful use of a body that was not hers to dispose of. He also urges Elena to accept grief and pray for her daughter’s soul, treating religious belief as the proper framework for understanding the death.

Elena refuses that framework. She redirects Father Juan from judgment after death to the truth she is trying to establish about Rita’s final day, and objects that her own illness—not God—has deprived her of control over her body. Her response exposes the gap between an abstract doctrine of bodily ownership and the lived experience of a body that no longer obeys its owner. When Father Juan calls her confidence in her interpretation pride, Elena counters that claiming exclusive authority over God’s word is itself arrogant. Their exchange makes the Church a contested source of authority rather than an uncontested answer to suffering.

Elena’s private unbelief further complicates the Church’s influence. Although her husband, Antonio, was a practicing Catholic who worked as a porter and theology teacher at Sacred Heart Catholic School, Elena does not believe in the soul or eternal life. She has concealed this disbelief, yet religious vocabulary remains in her thoughts: heaven, hell, resurrection, sin, and prayer persist even when faith does not. Her life shows how the Church’s language can remain culturally and emotionally present without being accepted as doctrine.

Worship and Lived Religious Practice

The church’s rituals shape the circumstances of Rita’s discovery. Boys assigned by Father Juan to ring the bells for the seven o’clock Mass find her in the belfry. Father Juan recognizes her, confirms that she is dead, and contacts the police, but asks that the service proceed before the authorities act at the scene. It is the Thursday after Pentecost, Corpus Christi, and he does not want to cancel the Mass. That evening the bells do not announce the service; worship nevertheless takes place, with parishioners seated below, unaware that Rita’s body is above them. The contrast between the service’s ordered observance and the hidden death gives the church building a double function: a communal sacred space and the setting of an undisclosed tragedy.

Rita’s religion is neither simple conformity nor simple rejection. She wears a cross and observes numerous customs, but avoids Mass when it rains because she fears lightning. She visits seven churches on Good Friday, fasts on Good Friday and the preceding Thursday, on Ash Wednesday, and on Fridays during Lent, and observes other devotional rules around Communion. At the same time, she does not attend every Mass, confess every sin, or pray every night. Her practice combines Church observances with habits and personal rules that do not all derive from formal doctrine. Elena, by contrast, exchanges the pink underwear Rita gives her for black pairs, a small domestic refusal that places personal preference alongside religious and seasonal custom.

Rita’s Use of Religious Teaching

Rita’s beliefs become consequential when she finds Isabel outside an abortion provider, ill and visibly distressed. Isabel says that she does not want to become a mother; Rita argues that Isabel is already a mother and invokes the life she is carrying, religious sin, and the future child’s claims. When Isabel continues to resist, Rita takes her away from the place and brings her to Elena’s home. The intervention prevents Isabel from obtaining an abortion and compels her to continue the pregnancy against her stated wishes.

The episode reveals a sharp distinction between religious practice as personal meaning and religious teaching used to direct another person’s body. Rita’s habits are selective and individually shaped, but in this encounter she treats her own convictions as binding on Isabel. The narrative presents that action as an exercise of power, not merely as private devotion: Rita applies the dogma she has learned to another woman’s body and overrides Isabel’s expressed decision. The Church’s teachings thus enter the story not only through clergy or formal worship, but through a daughter who claims religious authority in an intimate crisis.

Isabel later explains the coercive circumstances surrounding her pregnancy, including the violence and control imposed by her husband and the people around him. Her account does not make the Church the cause of that abuse; rather, it places Rita’s religious intervention within a life in which Isabel’s choices have already been sharply constrained. The distinction matters: a religious argument about motherhood can become another means of denying agency even when the pressures that produced a pregnancy come from elsewhere.

Community, Authority, and the Limits of Naming

For Father Juan, the church is not his possession but belongs to the community. Yet his conduct also shows how an individual religious authority decides when ritual, investigation, and mourning should take precedence. He arranges a service for Rita and tells Elena that she must make time to grieve, while Elena insists that she cannot mourn until she knows how her daughter came to die. Their disagreement is not simply over whether mourning is appropriate; it is over who has the authority to prescribe its timing and meaning.

The Church’s language of motherhood meets a final resistance in Elena’s question about what a woman with a dead child should be called. Father Juan reassures her that she remains a mother, but Elena fears that a fixed name could allow the Church to prescribe how she must behave, live, or die. The novel therefore leaves religious identity unsettled: ritual continues, inherited words endure, and the Church offers definitions, but Elena refuses to let those definitions replace inquiry or determine the limits of her life.