wrongful use of the body

The expression wrongful use of the body gives religious language to the claim that the body belongs to God, and in the novel it is used to condemn suicide, abortion, and euthanasia. Its force lies not only in the prohibitions it names but in the contrast between that doctrine and the characters’ lived experiences: bodies are not simply governed by individual choice, but also subjected to illness, coercion, and other people’s decisions.

Doctrinal Meaning

Father Juan invokes the expression while explaining the Church’s opposition to suicide and other actions understood as violations of divine ownership. He places suicide alongside abortion and euthanasia, treating them as different forms of the same offense. In his account, people may use their bodies but do not have the right to decide against the authority to which those bodies belong.

That principle shapes his response to Elena’s questions about Rita’s death. Rather than investigate the circumstances that led to it, Father Juan declares that Rita took her own life and frames the act as a violation of a body that belonged to God. His certainty offers a religious judgment, but it does not answer Elena’s central question about how Rita came to be at the church on a rainy day.

Bodies Under Other People’s Authority

The expression becomes more complicated when set against Rita’s intervention in Isabel’s unwanted pregnancy. Rita argues from religious conviction and prevents Isabel from reaching the abortion provider, insisting that Isabel must become a mother. The doctrine that denies a woman authority to end a pregnancy thus appears not as an abstract rule but as a belief Rita enforces on another person’s body, despite Isabel’s stated refusal of motherhood.

Isabel later describes how her husband and another man helped keep her under control during the pregnancy. Her account shows that the pregnancy and its consequences were shaped by others’ actions as well as by religious pressure. The phrase wrongful use of the body consequently sits beside a different, unacknowledged misuse: the control and coercion imposed on Isabel. The novel presents these forms of authority in tension rather than treating the body as a purely theological matter.

The Doctrine’s Ironies

The expression also acquires force through the contrast between Rita’s convictions and her death. Rita had imposed her understanding of religious doctrine on Isabel, yet she later takes her own life. The novel does not make that contradiction a simple rebuttal of her earlier beliefs; it makes it a painful measure of the distance between moral rules and the circumstances in which people live and act.

Elena’s encounter with Father Juan sharpens the conflict. She objects to his claim that the body belongs to God by pointing to her own loss of bodily control through Parkinson’s disease. Her condition limits movement and makes ordinary actions difficult; it is not a choice or a theological transgression. Against the priest’s language of ownership and permitted use, her experience raises the question of what agency remains when the body no longer reliably obeys its own person.

Narrative Significance

Across these episodes, wrongful use of the body is both a doctrinal formula and a contested description of bodily power. Father Juan uses it to judge suicide, while Rita’s intervention applies religious conviction to Isabel’s reproductive decision. Isabel’s history and Elena’s illness, in turn, reveal forms of bodily control that the formula does not adequately account for. The expression therefore links religious condemnation to the novel’s broader concern with who is allowed to decide what happens to a body—and whose suffering is recognized when that decision is taken away.