The death of Honorato Bonafé

Honorato Bonafé’s death at Nuestra Señora de las Lágrimas turns the church’s troubling run of apparent accidents into a criminal investigation. Bonafé falls from scaffolding by the high altar, drags himself into a confessional, and dies there; Father Príamo Ferro later says that he killed him and asks to be handed over to the police. The reconstruction supplies a likely motive and sequence, but not a fully settled account of the fatal confrontation.

Background and Suspicion

The death comes after two earlier fatalities at the church had been explained as misfortune. Municipal architect Peñuelas, sent to prepare a report on the building’s dangerous condition, fell when an scaffold railing gave way and was impaled on a metal tube. Father Urbizu died when scaffolding apparently dislodged a piece of cornice plaster weighing more than ten kilos. These accounts establish a pattern in which the church’s precarious restoration work offers plausible accidental explanations—and makes a new death there especially charged.

Bonafé is found in the confessional, where Lorenzo Quart notices feet protruding from its open door. The body is partly covered by blue canvas; one upturned hand, wax-yellow in color, bears a wound running from the wrist toward the index finger. The scene’s location seems at first an eerie detail, but the wound becomes part of the later reconstruction: it is consistent with an attempt to catch hold of a scaffolding bolt during the fall.

The Fall and the Confessional

Subcommissioner Simeón Navajo’s reconstruction places Bonafé on the scaffolding beside the Virgin’s image, at the high altar. The indications suggest that Ferro climbed up as well. The two men argued or struggled; Bonafé then fell, or was pushed, from a height of five metres. His injured hand is attributed to his attempt to grab a screw on the scaffolding.

Although badly injured, Bonafé was still alive after hitting the floor. Unable to walk, he crawled several metres toward the nearest refuge he could reach, the confessional, collapsed inside it, and died there. Navajo conveys the sequence with his hands, first miming the climb and then Bonafé’s slow movement across the floor. The gesture makes the distance and delay vivid, while preserving the uncertainty at the center of the account: the reconstruction cannot establish whether Bonafé fell in the struggle or was deliberately pushed.

The Pearl Trail and Ferro’s Confession

Navajo connects the killing to the substituted pearls on the Virgin’s image. Twenty imitation pearls had replaced the originals months earlier. The investigation traced the likely circulation of Captain Xaloc’s pearls through the Madrid dealer Francisco Montegrifo, who had previously been Ferro’s contact in the irregular sale of an altarpiece from Cillas de Ansó. The link remained circumstantial: the police could not prove Montegrifo’s role in the pearl transaction.

The money nevertheless offered a possible explanation for work restarting at the church. The date supplied by a police informant coincided with resumed restoration, purchases of building materials, and the rental of machinery; suppliers said those expenses exceeded what Ferro could afford from his salary and the church’s donations. Navajo reasoned that Bonafé had followed the pearl trail, confirmed the substitution, and gone to the church. He may have tried to blackmail Ferro, or Ferro may have surprised him before he could do so. In either case, Navajo’s account suggests that Ferro locked the sacristy door, spent a couple of hours in the tower of Casa del Postigo reflecting, and then disappeared for a day. The priest refused to explain that disappearance.

When Quart offers to help, Ferro rejects the prospect of a defense or alibi. He says that Bonafé was already dead inside the confessional when he closed the sacristy door, then states plainly that he killed him and asks Quart to deliver him to the police. His confession settles his claimed responsibility, but does not resolve whether the fatal fall was an accident in a violent encounter or a push. The distinction between Navajo’s reconstruction and Ferro’s blunt admission leaves the death’s mechanics less certain than its moral consequence.

A Death Among Earlier Accidents

Bonafé’s death acquires its force from the church’s earlier fatalities, each attributed to the hazards of restoration. Municipal architect Peñuelas had been commissioned by the city to prepare a report on the building’s ruinous condition. He had clashed more than once with Father Príamo Ferro; during his visits to the site, an andamio railing gave way, and Peñuelas fell onto a metal tube being installed. The archbishop described the death to Lorenzo Quart as bad luck, noting that another official and Father Óscar were present and that the latter administered the last rites.

Father Urbizu’s death was likewise explained as an accident, though no witnesses had seen it. The police suggested that he may have leaned on, or accidentally shifted, scaffolding. Its upper end struck the cornice and dislodged a large piece of plaster, apparently already loose but held in place by the metal structure. The fragment, weighing more than ten kilos, fell onto Urbizu’s head. Against these plausible accounts of deaths amid unstable scaffolding, Bonafé’s body in the church gives the recurring accidents a new and more troubling meaning.

The Church’s Theology of Death

Bonafé’s death belongs to a wider argument about what a church can offer when death seems to cancel every promise of meaning. Father Ferro recalls that, as a young priest, he read ancient philosophy from Socrates to Saint Augustine, only to retain an aftertaste of melancholy and disillusionment. At sixty-four, he says, he knows that people remember, fear, and die. For a quarter-century he had ministered to the dying in isolation, saying Mass in a nearly empty church and bringing the last rites to people who clung to his hands because he was their only comfort; he had prayed in one direction without receiving an answer.

Ferro’s defense of Nuestra Señora de las Lágrimas rests not on certainty about his own faith but on the faith of those who come to it. He argues that the Baroque church’s gilding, sculptures, and sumptuous altars offer worshippers a refuge from the annihilating prospect of death: too much analysis, he maintains, can destroy hope, while ritual and beauty make the church a firm place amid life’s tumult. Quart challenges this as alienation, comparing the church to seventeenth-century television. Bonafé’s death sharpens the dispute: the confessional is both a place of religious refuge and the final shelter of a dying man, while Ferro’s own conduct makes the priest who protects consolation responsible for a death within the church.

The conversations between Ferro and Quart also turn the killing toward the scale of the universe. Ferro’s astronomical image is not despair but serenity: the recognition that human beings are tiny and mortal makes what is valuable matter all the more, and leaves room for a friendly hand to offer consolation before the stars go out. Bonafé’s death gives that reflection a stark physical counterpart. The man falls from the altar scaffolding, crawls toward the nearest refuge, and dies in the confessional; the priest’s subsequent admission cannot restore him, but it brings the hidden violence into the open.

The Church’s Theology of Death

Bonafé’s death belongs to a wider argument about what a church can offer when death seems to cancel every promise of meaning. Father Príamo Ferro recalls that, as a young priest, he read ancient philosophy from Socrates to Saint Augustine, only to retain an aftertaste of melancholy and disillusionment. At sixty-four, he says, he knows that people remember, fear, and die. For a quarter-century he had ministered to the dying in isolation, saying Mass in a nearly empty church and bringing the last rites to people who clung to his hands because he was their only comfort; he had prayed in one direction without receiving an answer.

Ferro’s defense of Nuestra Señora de las Lágrimas rests not on certainty about his own faith but on the faith of those who come to it. He argues that the Baroque church’s gilding, sculptures, and sumptuous altars offer worshippers a refuge from the annihilating prospect of death: too much analysis, he maintains, can destroy hope, while ritual and beauty make the church a firm place amid life’s tumult. Lorenzo Quart challenges this as alienation, comparing the church to seventeenth-century television. Bonafé’s death sharpens the dispute: the confessional is both a place of religious refuge and the final shelter of a dying man, while Ferro’s own conduct makes the priest who protects consolation responsible for a death within the church.

The conversations between Ferro and Quart also turn the killing toward the scale of the universe. Ferro’s astronomical image is not despair but serenity: the recognition that human beings are tiny and mortal makes what is valuable matter all the more, and leaves room for a friendly hand to offer consolation before the stars go out. Bonafé’s death gives that reflection a stark physical counterpart. He falls from the altar scaffolding, crawls toward the nearest refuge, and dies in the confessional; Ferro’s subsequent admission cannot restore him, but it brings the hidden violence into the open.