Quart discovers Ferro once sold church artwork

Quart discovers Ferro once sold church artwork, a disclosure that turns a question of personal honesty into a pressure point in the struggle over Nuestra Señora de las Lágrimas. The evidence reaches back to Ferro’s service in a Pyrenean parish: a missing fifteenth-century altarpiece had been sold through a Madrid auction house, and Ferro received a payment far below the eventual auction price. The episode gives Quart grounds to challenge Ferro’s reputation, but it does not by itself prove that the priest is responsible for the current deaths or for the church’s precarious position.

The earlier church inquiry

A decade before Quart investigates Nuestra Señora de las Lágrimas, Ferro had faced an ecclesiastical inquiry in the diocese of Huesca. During his final period as parish priest at Cillas de Ansó in the Pyrenees, a painted panel and a crucifix disappeared from the parish. The crucifix was described as having little value; the panel was more consequential, dating from the first quarter of the fifteenth century and attributed to the Master of Retascón.

Ferro came through the inquiry with only a simple admonition from his ordinary. The account places that outcome in its institutional setting: Cillas de Ansó was a minor parish, and incidents involving church property were then common, when parish priests could dispose of the patrimony in their care with considerable freedom. The result was neither a finding that the disappearance had been harmless nor a severe disciplinary punishment. It left a mark in Ferro’s record, but one that had not prevented him from continuing as a priest.

Tracing the altarpiece

Quart checks the old case against information Honorato Bonafé had suggested and finds that the details coincide. The missing panel had entered the Madrid auction house Claymore legally, with a receipt, and was resold at a high price. The paperwork documents a transaction rather than an illicit transfer in the auction house’s own records; the unresolved ethical issue is the gap between what the artwork ultimately fetched and what Ferro received.

Subcomisario Simeón Navajo advances the inquiry through calls to Inspector Feijoo, the Madrid police official responsible for investigating art crimes. Claymore’s director, the dealer Francisco Montegrifo, confirms that the priest Príamo Ferro Ordás was paid for the panel. Ferro’s payment was a derisory sum beside the amount realized at auction, which was six times greater. Montegrifo’s explanation, relayed through Feijoo and Navajo, reduces the difference to the workings of supply and demand; it does not erase the disparity that makes the transaction troubling.

The evidence therefore has several distinct layers. A work attributed to the Master of Retascón disappeared from a parish; a matching work was later sold by Claymore with proper documentation; and Montegrifo confirmed a payment to Ferro that was only a fraction of the auction price. The chain supports Quart’s conclusion that Ferro had sold church property without authorization, while the earlier diocesan inquiry explains why the affair ended in an admonition rather than a full public reckoning.

Quart confronts Óscar

Quart brings the discovery into a conversation with Óscar Lobato, the parish vicar, who insists that Ferro is an honest man. Quart has just examined Ferro’s complete file in the Archbishopric of Seville’s archives, and the archbishop, Aquilino Corvo, has confirmed its contents in conversation beneath portraits of earlier prelates. Against that documented history, Quart tells Óscar that he has no proof Ferro has always been honest.

Óscar does not accept the implication as a reason to withdraw his trust. He says he respects the man he knows and tells Quart to look for his Judas elsewhere. Their disagreement is not simply over whether the transaction occurred: it turns on what a past case should be allowed to establish about Ferro now. Quart treats the file as relevant evidence; Óscar distinguishes the priest he knows from the priest described by an old disciplinary record. The exchange leaves the historical sale exposed without resolving the present suspicion.

A vulnerability in the church dispute

The old sale matters because Ferro’s conduct is already entangled with a dispute over authority, discipline, and the survival of Nuestra Señora de las Lágrimas. Under a privilege granted in 1687, the church is to retain its rights so long as Mass is celebrated there every Thursday for the soul of its benefactor, Gaspar Bruner de Lebrija. The archbishop, Aquilino Corvo, has sought Ferro’s suspension from office, but says the request to Rome is proceeding slowly. In the meantime, the Thursday Mass remains a condition with practical force: Macarena Bruner explains that a church envoy and a notary paid by Pencho Gavira watch for any irregularity or lapse.

In this setting, the record from Cillas de Ansó is more than biographical background. It offers the church hierarchy a documented reason to question Ferro’s standing at the very moment his continued ministry helps keep the church from demolition. Quart’s discovery also sits beside the competing accounts of the building itself. Gris Marsala, the architect responsible for its restoration, says that the church is neglected but structurally sound, that the irreversible structural cracks claimed by those pressing for demolition do not exist, and that nearly ten tons of roofing material were carried up to fifteen metres to repair the roof. The fate of the church cannot therefore be reduced either to a priest’s record or to the assertion that the building is beyond saving.

What the discovery establishes

Quart’s investigation establishes a specific past transaction and a conspicuous financial imbalance, not a complete explanation of Ferro’s character or of the church’s present dangers. Ferro had been reprimanded after church objects disappeared from Cillas de Ansó; a matching altarpiece was later auctioned by Claymore; and the dealer confirmed that Ferro was paid only a small fraction of its eventual price. These details make Óscar’s uncomplicated defense harder to sustain, but they do not cancel his personal knowledge of Ferro or prove that the priest is guilty of a new offense.

The episode also shows how information circulates through competing institutions. Quart consults diocesan archives, Corvo confirms the file, Bonafé has already pointed toward the old case, and Navajo’s police contacts verify the auction trail. Quart suspects that Corvo may not be displeased to see Ferro’s past circulated, even wondering whether Bonafé’s source might be connected to the archbishop’s circle. That remains Quart’s inference, not a confirmed account of how the journalist learned the story. The discovery thus unsettles Ferro’s moral authority while leaving the motives behind the disclosure, and its bearing on the current crisis, partly unresolved.