La iglesia como trinchera

La iglesia como trinchera names a church understood not as a fortress of institutional power but as a refuge for people exposed to suffering, death, and the erosion of meaning. Father Príamo Ferro first applies the image to Nuestra Señora de las Lágrimas; Father Óscar Lobato later repeats and enlarges it, making the church a position from which to resist both the hierarchy’s failures and the silence imposed in the name of obedience.

The Image and Its First Use

When Ferro calls his church a refuge and a trench, Lorenzo Quart initially treats the phrase as picturesque. His irony is a form of self-protection: he tries to restore the familiar distance between a powerful Vatican envoy and a shabby parish priest. But his question about what the church is defending against elicits Ferro’s blunt answer: “Frente a tanto cuento” and “tanta mierda.” The trench, in this first formulation, is a defense against the false stories and evasions surrounding the parish and the world beyond it.

The image recurs when Quart later hears it from Lobato. Ferro had used the same expression in an interview in Aquilino Corvo’s office, so the phrase travels from one priest to another and gathers a broader meaning. What first sounded to Quart like a provincial boast becomes a shared language for defending a vulnerable place and the people who depend on it.

A Church Against Its Own Institution

Lobato gives the metaphor its sharpest institutional edge. Asked what the church intends to resist, he answers that it must defend itself from the Holy Mother Church: an institution that, in his view, has betrayed its original message. He traces its losses across history—from the Reformation, through its opposition to reason, to its alignment with masters and oppressors—and predicts empty pews, with only mice left among them. The trench is therefore not simply a line against secular enemies; it is also a stance against the hierarchy’s failures and the submission and silence Quart represents to him.

Lobato’s account of clerical life makes that opposition personal. He recalls a system organized around forms, ambition, and calculated alliances, in which young priests choose patrons who may help them advance. He had once believed that priesthood meant serving people, but came to see how institutional maneuvering could leave a priest unable to offer the sign of hope that people seek. His trench metaphor turns dissent into a pastoral claim: the Church must be defended from the habits that keep it from fulfilling its purpose.

Shelter, Faith, and Consolation

Ferro’s defense of the parish does not depend on a simple declaration of his own certainty. At sixty-four, he says, what he knows of human beings is that they remember, fear, and die. He describes years of loneliness, neglected by his bishop and those around him, saying Mass in a small, nearly empty church and carrying the last rites through snow, rain, and mud to the dying. For a quarter century, he sat beside people who clutched his hands because he was their only consolation, while his prayers received no answer.

From that history Ferro draws a distinction between personal belief and the needs of those who come to him. Whether he himself has faith matters less, he argues, than the fact that his parishioners do; their need is reason enough for Nuestra Señora de las Lágrimas to exist. He describes the church’s Baroque art—its carvings, gilding, and sumptuous altars—as a form that can offer hope where relentless analysis might destroy it. Quart challenges this as alienation, comparing the church to seventeenth-century television. The disagreement leaves the metaphor deliberately unsettled: the parish can shelter people, but its consolation may also depend on forms that discourage scrutiny.

Ferro’s reflection on the cosmos extends the refuge beyond the church walls. Astronomy, he tells Quart, brings serenity because it clarifies how small human beings are against the universe; what may remain, before the stars go out, is a friendly hand that offers resignation and consolation. The church as trench answers not by disproving death or resolving the problem of unanswered prayer, but by placing companionship and ritual between human vulnerability and the void.

Memory, Loss, and the Defended Place

The metaphor also resonates with the novel’s stories of people who wait, remember, and are lost. Macarena Bruner recounts how her great-aunt Carlota’s letters to Manuel Xaloc were intercepted by her father. For six years, neither lover received the other’s correspondence; when Xaloc returned, Carlota had lost her reason and could not recognize him. A letter preserved the expectation of his return even as the family’s intervention made communication impossible. The tale makes memory both a refuge and a wound: it sustains hope, but cannot undo the years of separation.

For Macarena, the defense of Nuestra Señora de las Lágrimas belongs to a personal battle against time and forgetting. She describes herself as belonging to an extinguishing class and says she is defending the space and the things she loves, including the church and Carlota’s memory. Her image of a soldier surrendering only after firing the last cartridge gives the trench metaphor a finite, elegiac limit: resistance may not prevent an ending, but it can preserve a record of what mattered.

The church’s refuge is thus neither secure nor uncomplicated. It stands amid institutional betrayal, personal loss, and the knowledge of mortality. Ferro’s parishioners seek hope there; Lobato’s language insists that the institution must be confronted when it betrays its message; Macarena’s defense joins the building to family memory. Across these uses, the trench is a place of resistance and care, where fragile acts of consolation and remembrance hold their ground against forces they cannot finally overcome.