The Catholic principle of marital indissolubility

The Catholic principle of marital indissolubility is stated by Father Príamo Ferro as an absolute: what a priest binds on earth cannot be unbound even by God. In a conversation about Macarena Bruner’s separation from Pencho Gavira, that conviction places her continuing marriage beside the distinct, practical struggle to preserve Nuestra Señora de las Lágrimas, where an old privilege likewise depends on the continued performance of a religious rite.

The principle in a family dispute

Macarena’s mother insists that, whether Macarena lives with her husband or not, he will always be her husband. She appeals to Father Ferro as confirmation, explaining that although he dislikes her son-in-law, he maintains the indissolubility of every marriage. Ferro agrees without qualification: a priest’s binding cannot be undone, not even by God. The exchange makes the doctrine a living constraint in a household where separation has not dissolved the marital bond.

Lorenzo Quart, present but determined to remain outside the dispute, silently struggles to distinguish pride from virtue, and truth from error. His unease marks the gap between the force of an absolute rule and the difficulty of judging what it means in an individual life. The scene gives no formal ruling or account of any canonical procedure; it shows the principle being asserted in ordinary conversation, over Macarena’s unresolved marital circumstances.

Ritual, authority, and the church’s privilege

The novel sets this marital claim alongside a separate ecclesiastical condition governing Nuestra Señora de las Lágrimas. Archbishop Aquilino Corvo explains that a papally sanctioned privilege dating to 1687 prevents the church’s loss of its privileges so long as Mass is said there every Thursday for its benefactor, Gaspar Bruner de Lebrija. The Thursday observance commemorates the day of Gaspar’s death, in 1709. Macarena later explains that the Mass takes place at eight in the morning.

The condition has immediate stakes because secularizing the building is a prerequisite to its demolition. The continued rite therefore stands between the parish church and the demolition plans, but it does not make the conflict disappear: each Thursday, an emissary of the archbishop and a notary paid by Pencho Gavira watch from the last pew for an irregularity or oversight. Macarena fears that, with Father Óscar removed, someone may act against Ferro. The privilege offers protection only while its terms are observed; the possibility of a missed or defective Mass makes ritual observance a point of institutional pressure.

Doctrine amid discipline and doubt

Corvo distinguishes his disagreement with Ferro from a question of authority. He says the problem is discipline: the parish priest disregards his pastoral instructions and calls to order. Corvo has asked Rome to suspend Ferro from office, but the process is slow, and he suspects that the Vatican computer intrusion has made the authorities wait for Quart’s report. The contrast is consequential: the church’s marriage doctrine is voiced as an unqualified rule, while the attempt to discipline a priest is subject to institutional procedure and delay.

Ferro’s certainty about marriage coexists with a far less certain account of faith. At sixty-four, he recalls having studied ancient philosophy and then forgotten it, retaining only a bitter-sweet sense of melancholy and disillusionment. He says that what he has learned of human beings is that they remember, fear, and die. For a quarter of a century, he tended the dying and prayed without receiving an answer. He entertains the alternatives that life and death follow a plan or occur by accident, and describes faith as hope and consolation in a universe that otherwise seems meaningless.

That doubt does not lead him to abandon the church. Ferro argues that the people who come to Nuestra Señora de las Lágrimas have faith, and that their need justifies its existence. He defends the Baroque church’s ability to offer hope through images, gilding, and ceremony, even as Quart challenges the possibility that such consolation can become alienation. The marital principle thus belongs to a wider portrait of religion in the novel: doctrine and ritual remain powerful not because every cleric is free of doubt, but because they govern relationships and offer consolation to people facing loss.

Significance

Marital indissolubility is not presented as an abstract theological discussion alone. Macarena’s separation leaves the marriage intact in Ferro’s account, making the doctrine personally consequential; the threatened church, meanwhile, is protected by a different binding condition, the repeated Thursday Mass. The parallel is not an equivalence: one concerns the permanence of marriage, the other the preservation of a church’s privileges. Together they show how religious commitments persist beyond the feelings or intentions of the people caught within them, even as the novel exposes the vulnerability of the institutions that uphold them.