Nuestra Señora de las Lágrimas facing demolition and closure

Nuestra Señora de las Lágrimas faces demolition and closure not because its structure is beyond repair, but because its future is entangled with ecclesiastical procedure, redevelopment money, and the people who continue to use and defend it. The church’s old privilege makes a Thursday Mass a practical barrier to demolition; its threatened loss turns a neglected building into a contest over whose history and needs will count.

A Historic Building in Disrepair

Gris Marsala, the architect responsible for the restoration, has worked on the church for two years on behalf of the Eurnekian Foundation, which supplied one-third of the project’s initial funding. The restoration began with three architects, but the two Spaniards left; meanwhile, budgets were not approved, money failed to arrive, and work nearly stopped. The building’s visibly poor condition therefore reflects an unfinished and underfunded restoration as well as long neglect.

The church is three centuries old. Gris contrasts the respect such an age would command in her own country with the indifference shown to old buildings in Seville. Yet she disputes the claim, advanced by the City Council, the bank, and the Archbishopric to justify demolition, that the church is collapsing. Although neglected for roughly 150 years, its structure remains sound: neither the walls nor the vault have irreversible cracks. Most damage is in the finishes, caused by damp penetrating through defective roofs.

Gris describes a repair already carried out: the roofs were retiled with lime, cement, and sand, with almost ten tons of material hauled up to a height of fifteen metres. She and Óscar Lobato did that work themselves. A piece of gilded plaster did fall from the cornice above the pulpit and killed Father Urbizu, but Gris identifies the damaged area as a local defect and calls the incident bad luck, not proof that the entire structure is irreparable. The distinction matters: the church is old and damaged, but its decay is also being used to make demolition appear inevitable.

The Thursday Mass and the Privilege

The demolition plan requires the church to be secularized first. Aquilino Corvo tells Lorenzo Quart that this process has become complicated because of a privilege granted in 1687 with papal approval by an earlier Archbishop of Seville. Under its terms, Nuestra Señora de las Lágrimas keeps its privileges as long as Mass is celebrated there every Thursday for the soul of its benefactor, Gaspar Bruner de Lebrija. The weekly rite is thus not only devotional: it is a condition with immediate consequences for the proposed demolition.

Macarena explains the exact routine to Quart: Mass must be said at eight in the morning every Thursday, the day Gaspar died in 1709. The condition is watched closely. Each Thursday, an emissary of the Archbishopric and a notary paid by Pencho Gavira sit in the last row, looking for an irregularity or omission that could invalidate the protection. What appears to be a small, inherited observance has become a point where religious practice, legal procedure, and the property scheme meet.

Corvo says he has asked Rome to suspend Father Ferro from office, but the process is slow. He frames the dispute as a matter of discipline: Ferro disregards his pastoral letters and calls to order. That effort is distinct from the question of whether the Archbishop can simply prevent a parish priest from saying Mass; Corvo concedes that authority alone is not the obstacle. The slow suspension process and the closely monitored Thursday service leave the church’s status dependent on an ongoing ritual that its opponents have reason to see interrupted.

Money and Redevelopment

The church’s parish has little money to sustain itself. Macarena tells Quart that the Duchess and she have only enough to live on, Father Ferro’s salary is small, and the Sunday collection cannot pay even for candle wax. The restoration’s stalled funding and the parish’s poverty form the material background to a demolition proposal presented by institutional and financial interests as practical necessity.

The redevelopment has substantial stakes for the Archbishopric and Banco Cartujano. In discussions with Pencho Gavira, Corvo anticipates a substantial indemnity for the Archbishopric and a commitment from the bank to build a church elsewhere. The package also includes a foundation for social work among the Roma community. Gavira carefully observes that the church still belongs to Corvo, preserving a dignified way for the Archbishop to retreat from the deal if necessary; Corvo accepts the courtesy. The exchange reveals how the church’s future is being negotiated through compensation, replacement construction, and additional commitments, even as its existing congregation and building remain at risk.

Gris sees the threat as part of a wider preference for erasing inherited forms rather than preserving them. She invokes the Futurists’ proposal to dynamite Venice as an extreme expression of a destructive impulse that has since found subtler methods in architecture, literature, and theology. She does not describe the defenders of Nuestra Señora de las Lágrimas as a unified faction: Father Óscar has found a cause in the church, while Father Ferro wages a personal rebellion against distant authority. Their different motives gather around the same threatened place without becoming a single organized cause.

A Local Church Far from Rome

For Quart, the church’s threatened closure becomes inseparable from the limits of his mission. Sent by the Institute for External Works to identify the author of a letter and maintain discreet contact with the local church authorities, he understands that the institutional inquiry is concerned above all with the hacker’s identity and the possibility of scandal. The lives gathered within the church’s walls do not fit the report he is expected to deliver.

The narrative compares Nuestra Señora de las Lágrimas to the Manigua, Captain Xaloc’s small vessel moving in a zigzag course before an impassive, soulless battleship. The image makes the imbalance of scale palpable: a local parish and its particular histories face institutions capable of deciding its fate from far away. Later, as the prospect of Father Ferro’s arrest threatens the next morning’s service, Macarena realizes what Quart has already understood: if no Mass is said on Thursday, the church’s privilege may expire, leaving the Archbishop of Seville, the City Council, and Banco Cartujano free to move against it. The danger of closure is therefore not simply a future possibility. It gathers around one service, one priest, and a building whose survival depends on preserving both its physical fabric and the practice that protects it.