El enemigo ha arrasado tu santuario

“El enemigo ha arrasado tu santuario” is the opening line of the biblical lament that Vísperas leaves on the Pope’s computer. The message turns an ancient description of a violated holy place into an accusation with immediate force: the Vatican’s own security apparatus is being breached, while a church in Seville faces pressure from those seeking its demolition. Its scriptural language makes the intrusion both warning and interpretation, framing attacks on sacred space as a continuing conflict rather than a safely past calamity.

The message on the Pope’s computer

After Vísperas had inserted a pirated file into a trap and put the Pope’s personal computer beyond the technicians’ reach, Father Arregui read what appeared on the screen. The passage began with the devastation of a sanctuary, then described aggressors roaring in an assembly and raising their own standards. It moved from violence against the building’s carved and constructed features to the burning and profanation of the sacred place, and ended by asking how long the enemy would continue to reproach the faithful. The sequence gives the warning a material scale: not simply opposition to belief, but an assault on the sanctuary’s structure, images, and sacred identity.

The words are presented as a continuous lament, but their arrival is inseparable from the computer’s compromised state. Vísperas had made the Pope’s machine inaccessible, and after the text appeared the hacker cut contact and vanished from the screen. The sacred passage thus occupies a space controlled, for the moment, by the intruder. Its contrast between the sanctuary and the aggressors’ standards also lends the intrusion a political edge: the warning imagines hostile forces not merely entering holy ground but asserting their own symbols there.

Identification as Psalm 73

The priests monitoring the breach try to identify the source of the text. Father Cooey starts the printer to obtain a copy and asks whether the passage is Psalm 63. Father Arregui corrects him: it is Psalm 73, identified as “Lamentación ante el Templo Devastado.” That correction matters because the message is not an improvised threat dressed in religious language; it is a quotation from a lament whose subject is the destruction of a temple. The passage itself supplies the frame through which the reader is invited to understand the warning.

The exchange also distinguishes different kinds of knowledge among the men confronting the attack. The technicians can describe the computer’s behavior, but recognizing the text requires scriptural familiarity. Father Arregui’s exact identification converts a sequence of alarming lines into a named lament, while the printer makes the recovered words a copy that can be examined beyond the fleeting screen. The reference is specific, but it does not reveal who Vísperas is or what further action the hacker intends.

The breach and its vanishing traces

After the message, the priests cannot locate Vísperas. Father Garofi moves the cursor across his computer without success and explains that each loop leaves behind what he calls demolition charges, destroying the traces as the hacker departs. The metaphor echoes the psalm’s destruction of the sanctuary: in one register, the passage describes a holy place being broken apart; in another, the computer attack erases the evidence needed to follow its author. The message remains readable even when the intruder’s path does not.

That imbalance gives the episode its peculiar force. Vísperas can leave words in the Pope’s system but cannot be found through the available search; the priests can preserve and interpret the message, but not answer it with an identification. Father Cooey concludes that the hacker knows the Psalms and also has a sense of humor. The judgment follows the abrupt coexistence of solemn lament and a computer display in which small balls bounce, multiply, and produce little mushroom-shaped bursts marked with the word “bum.” Scriptural seriousness and digital playfulness are not alternatives here: the same elusive intruder uses both.

Sacred space and the church in Seville

The psalm’s image gains a further resonance from the dispute over Nuestra Señora de las Lágrimas in Seville. The church cannot be demolished while a Thursday Mass is said for the soul of Gaspar Bruner de Lebrija, according to a privilege granted in 1687; the Archbishop of Seville explains that secularization, a prerequisite for demolition, has become complicated by that condition. Later, Macarena Bruner describes the weekly observance as the fragile protection on which the church’s survival depends. An archbishop’s representative and a notary paid by Pencho Gavira attend the Thursday service, watching for an irregularity or lapse that might defeat the protection.

The psalm does not identify that local struggle as the subject of Vísperas’s message, nor does the text establish a connection between the hacker and the church dispute. Its relevance is instead a powerful structural echo. In the Vatican, the image of a ruined sanctuary appears on the Pope’s computer; in Seville, a real church’s fate turns on a recurring Mass and an old ecclesiastical privilege. One is an electronic warning, the other an institutional and property conflict, but both make sacred space vulnerable to powers capable of entering, controlling, or dismantling it.

A warning that remains unresolved

The episode offers no confirmed identity for Vísperas. The technicians’ description of the disappearing traces emphasizes the limits of their investigation, while the priests’ correct naming of Psalm 73 establishes the hacker’s command of scripture without explaining the purpose of the intrusion. The message’s question about how long the enemy will reproach the faithful is therefore left suspended: it belongs to the quoted lament, but also resonates as a challenge that the men at the computers cannot yet answer.

The phrase is more than an ominous title. It gives the breach a language of desecration, makes the hacker’s scriptural literacy legible, and joins the episode’s technical evasion to the novel’s recurring concern with endangered churches. Yet it does not settle who counts as the enemy or what response the warning demands. Like the vanished signal, the words remain present after their sender has disappeared.