Laudes

Laudes, or Lauds, is the morning prayer office that forms part of Lorenzo Quart’s exacting daily religious routine. Its significance is both intimate and institutional: for Quart, it is a practice maintained through discipline rather than piety, while the repeated liturgical life of Nuestra Señora de las Lágrimas gives its congregation consolation and helps protect the church from demolition.

Place in Quart’s routine

In Seville, while waiting for an appointment at the Archbishopric, Quart stops at the Giralda beer hall on Mateos Gago Street and reads a worn copy of Bernard of Clairvaux’s In Praise of the New Knighthood. He alternates this reading with the offices of the breviary—Maitines, Laudes, Vísperas, and Completas—and observes them rigorously. The narration distinguishes the habit from an expression of devotion: Quart’s meticulous observance answers to pride and discipline, not an appeal to piety.

The routine accompanies the solitude of his work. Hours spent in hotels, cafés, and airports between appointments and journeys leave him isolated; Bernard’s medieval sermon, once a spiritual guide for the warrior monks in the Holy Land, helps him endure that professional loneliness. The book’s account of Laudes therefore places the office within a personal structure of repeated practice, sustained even when Quart’s faith is uncertain.

The parish’s recurring worship

The office belongs to a broader pattern of observance at Nuestra Señora de las Lágrimas, where Father Príamo Ferro celebrates Mass every day at eight in the morning, except Sundays and holy days, when he celebrates twice. Quart later attends one of these services. The parish is in disrepair, with scaffolding across its walls and pews stacked against them, but about twenty worshippers still gather in the nave, many of them older residents, workers, retirees, and women on their way to shop.

Ferro’s liturgy combines established ritual with older forms. He wears the amice, a vestment associated with pre–Second Vatican Council practice, and an old guitar-shaped chasuble. He also says in Latin those parts of the Mass not directly addressed to the congregation or recited collectively, despite Church rules established under Paul VI requiring Mass in each parish’s local language to promote understanding and participation. The coexistence of a regular schedule, traditional vestments, and partial use of Latin makes the parish’s worship visibly resistant to complete modernization.

Ritual as consolation and protection

Watching Ferro celebrate, Quart is moved despite his skepticism and his disdain for the priest. The gestures and words of the service lend Ferro an authority that his shabby cassock, unpolished shoes, and worn vestments do not possess on their own. For the people gathered in the church, the rite matters less as an argument about reward, punishment, or eternal life than as a source of consolation: warmth against cold, or a friendly hand in darkness. Quart recognizes that understanding the church requires seeing the practical comfort its ritual gives its tired congregation.

That repeated worship also has a concrete legal consequence. Nuestra Señora de las Lágrimas remains protected from demolition so long as Mass is said every Thursday for the soul of Macarena Bruner’s ancestor Gaspar Bruner de Lebrija, who died on that weekday in 1709, at eight in the morning. Each Thursday, an envoy of the Archbishop and a notary paid by Pencho Gavira watch from the back pews for an irregularity or lapse. Macarena fears that, with Father Óscar transferred away, someone might act against Ferro; if any priest failed to say the Mass or omitted its required formula, the church could be demolished, giving the Archbishop and Banco Cartujano the victory in their dispute over its future. In this arrangement, the recurring liturgy is at once worship, consolation, and the condition on which the building’s survival depends.