Quart questions Priamo Ferro

Lorenzo Quart’s questioning of Father Príamo Ferro is an inquiry that fails on its own official terms and becomes more consequential as a test of what the parish means to its priest and its worshippers. Quart arrives seeking an explanation for the deaths at Nuestra Señora de las Lágrimas and a message addressed to the Holy See. Ferro denies that he knows more than he has said, refuses to submit to the questioning, and will not abandon the church. What Quart initially treats as obstruction gradually reveals a conflict between ecclesiastical authority and the local work of giving comfort—and, later, between a plausible police reconstruction and what can actually be known.

The inquiry and its limits

The deaths are central to Quart’s questions, but the church’s archbishop, Aquilino Corvo, presents them as accidents rather than mysteries. Municipal architect Peñuelas had been commissioned to prepare the report on the church’s dangerous condition. After quarrelling with Ferro, he fell when a wooden scaffolding rail gave way and was impaled on a metal pipe. Corvo says that another municipal official and Father Óscar were present, and that Óscar administered the last rites. In a separate account, Simeón Navajo explains that Father Urbizu may have accidentally set a scaffold moving; it dislodged more than ten kilograms of plaster from the cornice, which struck him on the head. The competing details make the deaths concrete, but do not establish that either was deliberate.

Quart’s questioning shifts from the reported accidents to Ferro’s judgment and possible involvement. He invokes the words about a church that kills to defend itself, which appear in a message inserted into the Holy See’s systems, and asks how Ferro interprets them. Ferro says he does not know what Quart means. Corvo confirms that Ferro also declined to answer him, and appears to take pleasure in the difficulty this creates for Quart. The inquiry’s formal warning—that the report may lead to serious disciplinary measures—has little leverage: Ferro is sixty-four and close to retirement, and the prospect of Roman discipline does not seem to concern him.

When Quart asks whether Ferro can affirm, as a priest, that no human intervention caused the two deaths, Ferro tells him to go to hell. He then formally refuses to continue the interrogation and announces that he will remain silent. Quart notes that the declaration is belated: Ferro has spent much of their twenty-minute conversation saying very little. The exchange establishes both a sharp confrontation and its limit. Quart can invoke the Curia and disciplinary procedure, but neither compels Ferro to speak.

A parish defended as refuge

Quart’s final question is why Ferro will not leave the church. Ferro says the matter concerns him and his bishop, not Quart. When Quart presses him to consider cooperating, Ferro answers not with an account of legal or political strategy but with the lives that Quart has not shared: the confession of a poor woman seeking consolation, a newborn’s cry, a dying person’s breathing, and the sweat of a hand held in another’s. Quart recognizes that his diplomatic passport and official backing confer no real power over this priest. He recalls Nelson Corona, whose distance from official reality had also unsettled him, though Ferro’s expression seems harder and less fearful.

Ferro calls the church a refuge, a trench. Quart asks what it is a trench against; Ferro answers that it stands against so much nonsense and so much shit. His blunt formulation turns the church from an object in a property and disciplinary dispute into a place of resistance. The old priest’s refusal is not simply a refusal to cooperate with Quart: it is bound to the parish’s function for people who come to it in grief, fear, and need.

The church’s survival also depends on a precise ritual obligation. Macarena Bruner explains to Quart that Nuestra Señora de las Lágrimas is protected from demolition so long as a Mass is celebrated for her ancestor Gaspar Bruner de Lebrija every Thursday at eight in the morning, the hour associated with his death in 1709. Each Thursday, an archbishop’s representative and a notary paid by Pencho Gavira watch from the last pew for an irregularity or lapse. A priest who failed to say the Mass, or neglected its required formula, could leave the church exposed to demolition. Thus the repeated service operates at once as worship, a memorial, and a legal condition on which the building’s continued existence rests.

The Mass Quart witnesses

Quart later attends Ferro’s morning Mass. A beggar sits outside with crutches against the wall; inside, about twenty parishioners occupy half the nave while the remaining benches are stacked against the walls among scaffolding. Most of the congregation are modestly dressed women and older people, including workers about to start the day, pensioners, and shoppers with baskets or carts. Macarena is among them, three benches ahead of Quart. The setting places the ritual amid an unfinished, damaged church and the ordinary needs of its neighbors.

Ferro’s vestments make his resistance to liturgical change visible. He wears an amice, a garment associated with the Mass before the Second Vatican Council, and an old guitar-shaped chasuble, cut differently from the lighter style that replaced it. He reads the Gospel from memory, in a steady voice that fills the small church without a microphone. During the service, he says in Latin those parts not addressed directly to the congregation or meant to be recited collectively. Quart recognizes that this only partly follows the Church’s post-Paul VI direction that Mass be celebrated in each parish’s language to promote understanding and participation. The service is therefore neither simple obedience to modern rules nor a rejection of the rite: Ferro preserves an older form within a living parish.

Watching the priest raise the host and chalice, Quart is moved despite his technical skepticism and dislike of Ferro. For a moment, the ritual gives the shabby, stubborn parish priest an authority that his worn vestments and unpolished shoes do not otherwise suggest. Quart sees that the congregation’s attention does not depend on certainty about divine reward or punishment. The solemn actions and words offer these tired faces warmth, companionship, and consolation. He realizes that he has crossed into an understanding of the church, Ferro, the message from Vísperas, and his own presence there: contempt had made the priest easier to dismiss, while the Mass makes his work visible.

From interrogation to a harder knowledge

A later conversation gives the priest’s resistance a longer history. Ferro recalls that, as a young priest, he read ancient philosophy from Socrates to Augustine, then forgot nearly all of it, retaining only a bitter taste of melancholy and disappointment. At sixty-four, he says, he knows that people remember, fear, and die. He describes years spent seeking a response from God while witnessing suffering and death, overlooked by his bishop and those around him. He served a small, nearly empty church and brought the last rites through snow, rain, and mud to the old. For a quarter of a century, dying people clung to his hands because he was their only comfort; he spoke to God through their deaths but heard no answer. The account gives the meaning of his insistence on the parish in lived experience rather than theological argument.

The questioning’s uncertainty returns in the later discovery of Honorato Bonafé’s body in the church confessional. Quart sees the open door, the body partly covered by blue canvas, and a wax-yellow hand with a cut running from wrist to index finger. Navajo reconstructs a possible sequence: Bonafé had climbed the scaffold by the main altar near the Virgin’s image; Ferro may have climbed after him; the two may have argued or struggled, and Bonafé fell or was pushed from a height of five metres. The cut could have come from his attempt to catch a scaffold screw. Still alive after the fall, he may have crawled to the confessional, the nearest place he could reach, and died there.

Navajo’s reconstruction supplies a possible motive as well as a possible route to the death. Investigators believe the pearls on the Virgin’s image had been replaced months earlier with twenty identical imitations. Evidence points toward the Madrid dealer Francisco Montegrifo, previously linked to Ferro in the irregular sale of an altarpiece, as a likely intermediary in circulating Captain Xaloc’s pearls. A police informant’s date for the pearls’ appearance coincides with the resumption of church repairs, and suppliers say that the building materials and rented machinery exceeded what Ferro’s salary and the parish collection could cover. Navajo suggests that Bonafé discovered the imitation pearls and tried to blackmail Ferro—or that Ferro surprised him during the theft and killed him.

But the reconstruction remains a reconstruction. Navajo cannot establish whether Bonafé fell or was pushed, whether he attempted blackmail, or whether Ferro caught him in the act. He says Ferro locked the sacristy door, spent a couple of hours in the tower of Casa del Postigo reflecting, and then disappeared for a day; Ferro has not explained that absence. These gaps prevent the interrogation from resolving into a complete account. Quart’s encounter with Ferro instead holds together two incompatible pressures: the evidence that may implicate a priest in violence, and the visible consoling work of a man who insists that his church must remain open.