Vísperas sends a second warning to the Pope's computer system

Vísperas’s second warning reaches Lorenzo Quart in Seville as a biblical injunction against destroying God’s temple. The message turns the endangered Nuestra Señora de las Lágrimas into more than the object of a property dispute: it casts the threatened church as sacred ground and makes demolition sound like an offense that will bring divine punishment. Yet the warning’s force is sharpened by its concealment. Quart can show the text to Óscar Lobato, but withholds the technical explanation of how it was delivered and what the investigators have learned about the sender.

Delivery in Seville

The warning reaches Quart after he has visited both the Archbishop’s Palace and subcommissioner Simeón Navajo. He goes to Nuestra Señora de las Lágrimas in midmorning and finds it empty except for the sanctuary lamp burning beside the altar. Scaffolding stands against the walls; the ceiling is blackened, and the gilded reliefs of the altarpiece sit in shadow. In this damaged, quiet setting, Quart tells Óscar Lobato that Vísperas has attacked again.

Quart then shows Óscar a copy of the message, which has been forwarded by fax from Rome. It arrived there at about one in the morning, while Quart was arguing with Honorato Bonafé in the lobby of the Hotel Doña María. The route gives the episode an institutional as well as a local dimension: an intrusion aimed at the Pope’s computer system becomes a paper message in a Seville church, where its warning bears directly on the church’s precarious fate.

The warning’s biblical language

The text quotes the First Letter to the Corinthians: “The temple of the Lord is God’s field, God’s building. If anyone destroys God’s temple, God will destroy him. For the temple of God is holy.” Óscar recognizes the source and identifies it as First Corinthians before returning the paper to Quart. The words do not name the church or its opponents, but their application is difficult to miss in a story where Nuestra Señora de las Lágrimas faces demolition.

The message makes a theological claim in the form of a threat: those who destroy the sacred place will themselves face destruction. Its wording therefore resonates with the church’s existing defense, while remaining distinct from the legal and ecclesiastical mechanisms that temporarily protect it. An old privilege requires a Thursday Mass for Gaspar Bruner de Lebrija; the archbishop, Aquilino Corvo, has sought the suspension of Príamo Ferro, whose continued observance matters to the church’s survival. Vísperas’s scriptural warning adds no new legal protection, but gives the conflict a stark spiritual vocabulary.

What Quart withholds

Although Quart gives Óscar the message, he does not tell him everything known about its transmission. As on the previous occasion, Ignacio Arregui’s team diverted the intruder to a parallel file, where Vísperas left the message believing it had been placed on the Pope’s personal computer. Garofí traced the signal to the telephone line of El Corte Inglés in central Seville. The hacker had created an electronic loop to conceal the trail.

That distinction between what Quart displays and what he keeps back shapes the encounter. Óscar receives the biblical text, identifies its source, and appears about to say something; instead, he merely shakes his head and sits beside Quart. Quart does not disclose the technical findings or the circumstances of the message’s arrival. The warning is thus legible as scripture, while the identity and full purpose of its sender remain obscured.

The church and its layered defenses

The second warning arrives amid a contest over whether Nuestra Señora de las Lágrimas can be secularized and demolished. Corvo has explained that an inherited privilege, granted in 1687 with papal sanction, preserves the church’s privileges so long as Mass is celebrated there each Thursday for Gaspar Bruner de Lebrija. Macarena Bruner later explains that the observance takes place at eight in the morning on the anniversary of his death in 1709. Each Thursday, an emissary of the archbishop and a notary paid by Pencho Gavira watch from the last pews for a lapse or irregularity.

These details make the church’s defense precarious rather than invulnerable. Its continuance depends on an old condition being fulfilled and on Ferro not failing to observe it; meanwhile, the archbishop has requested Ferro’s suspension, and the parish is short of money for the stalled repairs. Against that concrete pressure, Vísperas’s message proposes a different kind of protection: not a deed, a privilege, or a reliable institutional ruling, but a warning grounded in the holiness of the temple. The contrast gives the hacker’s intervention its force without establishing that the church is literally protected by supernatural barriers.

Significance of the second warning

Vísperas’s repeated attack links the Vatican computer intrusion to the immediate Seville struggle. The message’s language offers a defense of sacred space precisely when the church’s fate appears to depend on fragile legal custom, clerical discipline, and Thursday attendance. Its arrival does not resolve the demolition dispute, identify the hacker, or explain whether the warning is intended as advocacy, threat, or both.

Instead, the episode places two forms of uncertainty side by side. The message’s biblical meaning is clear enough for Óscar to recognize, but its technical path is concealed from him; the church’s privilege is precise, yet the people protecting it fear that a missed Mass or a change in the priest’s status could undo it. The second warning therefore intensifies the novel’s central collision between institutional procedure and sacred claim, while leaving its sender’s motives and the ultimate efficacy of the warning unsettled.