“Mía es la venganza”

“Mía es la venganza” (“Vengeance is mine”) is a biblical phrase that Lorenzo Quart recalls as he forces himself not to strike a journalist. In the novel, it marks the gap between religious principle and human impulse, while its echoes across the church’s institutional conflicts make vengeance, restraint, and control difficult to separate.

The phrase in the confrontation

Near the Archbishopric of Seville, Honorato Bonafé alludes to Quart’s social life in Seville and winks as though the insinuation were a joke. Quart tightens a key in his sound hand and considers using it against him. He immediately recognizes that the prospect is untenable: a priest cannot credibly attack a journalist over a woman’s name, at night, only hours after a public scene with a jealous official. He also knows that his position in the Institute for External Works makes such an incident professionally dangerous.

The biblical phrase comes to mind as Quart struggles to regain control. It does not erase his anger or make the temptation unreal; it gives him a reason to contain it. Bonafé, meanwhile, proposes a bargain: each man can exchange information, and Bonafé will leave Quart out of the matter. He claims to have a moral code despite being a journalist and names Truth as his religion. Quart repeats the word, turning the exchange back on the journalist’s claim to virtue.

Institutional restraint and threatened force

The phrase’s moral tension belongs to a wider contest over who may act, who must remain silent, and who controls the consequences. In Rome, Cardinal Iwaszkiewicz favors involving the Holy Office “in the old style,” while Paolo Spada explains that the Pope wants a proper inquiry and considers the Holy Office an excessive response. The stated issue is the church in Seville, where two deaths have occurred within three months; the choice of investigative authority is also a choice about the scale and character of intervention.

When Iwaszkiewicz assigns Quart the mission, he limits it to gathering information and demands “exquisite neutrality.” Quart is told to avoid publicity and scandal, and warned that publicly aired truth does not always make people free. The ring-kissing ceremony that follows is both submission and a display of the cardinal’s power: Quart delays for a beat before kneeling, and the sign of the cross over his head can be read as either blessing or threat. Against this background, the language of leaving vengeance to God sits beside an institution carefully reserving the right to decide what action is permissible.

A church under competing descriptions

Aquilino Corvo presents the church’s proposed land deal as beneficial to the diocese: Banco Cartujano would use the site, provide generous compensation, finance a church in one of Seville’s poorest neighborhoods, and establish a foundation supporting social work among the Roma community. Corvo softens his possessive from “my diocese” to “this diocese,” while acknowledging that the church’s claim to the land is moral rather than legal, grounded in three centuries of worship. The proposal’s language of compensation and public benefit contrasts with the fact that the deal is stalled by an elderly priest who refuses to yield.

Corvo describes that priest, Father Príamo Ferro, as proud, unruly, and out of touch. He says Ferro celebrates part of Mass in Latin because he believes it commands greater respect, and portrays him as a remnant of impoverished rural clergy. Corvo’s account casts the priest as an obstacle to institutional management; it also hints at the force once available to church authorities, who could dismiss or exile a troublesome cleric, but now must reckon with journalists and politics.

Father Óscar offers a sharply different account of what the church is defending. He says it has betrayed its original message, recounting losses of influence among Protestants, rationalists, workers, young people, and women, and imagining empty pews as its eventual inheritance. He identifies submission and silence—not the defense of faith—as the danger Quart brings with him. His account of clerical advancement, built around ambition, patronage, and ritual forms emptied of their purpose, turns the dispute over the parish into a struggle over whether obedience protects the church or conceals its failures.

The phrase’s double edge

Across these scenes, religious language does not belong to one side alone. Corvo frames the redevelopment as support for the diocese and the poor; Iwaszkiewicz invokes divine help while restricting what Quart may reveal; Father Óscar presents silence as the institution’s defense; and Bonafé makes Truth his professed religion while offering a self-interested pact. The phrase Quart recalls is therefore not a simple declaration that wrongs will be righted. It is a restraint imposed on his immediate anger, set against institutions and individuals who each claim authority to define justice, truth, and the proper limits of action.