Catholic Church

The Catholic Church is a consequential presence in the novel not only as a religious authority but as an institution whose rituals and boundaries have shaped life in the Baztán Valley. Its history is marked by the exclusion of the Agotes, while its sacraments and teachings provide the language through which characters interpret infant death, desecration, and evil. The narrative also keeps these registers distinct: church practice, local belief, and the arguments of individual clerics or clinicians do not amount to one unified doctrine.

Historical Exclusion of the Agotes

For centuries, the Agotes of Bozate were barred from ordinary social participation, and the Church reinforced rather than relieved their marginalization. Although they were Christians who observed Catholic rites, they were treated as outsiders: they could not approach the altar, and in some churches they had to enter through a separate, smaller doorway and remain at the back of the nave. At Arizkun, a railing separated them from other worshippers. Their separate baptismal font marked them out even within a sacrament shared by the community, and the holy water used for them was thrown away.

The discrimination was part of a wider system of restrictions, not simply an unpleasant difference in ceremony. The Agotes were confined to Bozate, barred from owning businesses and from marrying outside their group, and associated with trades thought to be unclean. They were required to wear an identifying mark and, like people feared as lepers, to ring a bell to announce their presence. Amaia Salazar places their treatment alongside the persecution of other stigmatized groups and recalls that women accused of witchcraft were burned in the Baztán Valley, sometimes after denunciation by their own neighbors. The church’s role in the Agotes’ exclusion is presented as one part of a larger history in which religious authority and social fear could reinforce one another.

A papal decree eventually recognized the Agotes’ right to the same treatment as other neighbors and called for discrimination to end. That intervention did not erase the injury: local customs and beliefs endured, and discrimination continued for years. In the investigation of the desecrations at Arizkun, the damaged objects make this history legible. A baptismal font, a front-row bench reserved for nobles, and altar cloths each refer to practices or spaces from which the Agotes had been excluded. The desecrations therefore evoke a specific local history of religious segregation rather than functioning as generic attacks on sacred objects.

Baptism, Infant Death, and Local Belief

Catholic baptism also supplies the religious context for the folk belief surrounding the mairu-beso. Jonan Etxaide explains that, according to the tradition, such an object had to come from an infant who died unbaptized; an adult’s bone could not qualify. The object’s supposed power derived from both the child’s age and the child’s sacramental status. The belief is described as popular magical tradition, not as an official Catholic teaching.

The distinction mattered because baptism was both religious and social: in the account Jonan gives, it signaled membership in the Christian community. The Church had a protocol for sick or dying infants and did not baptize them, while high infant mortality encouraged families to baptize newborns as soon as possible. Children who died without baptism could be buried outside the cemetery wall or at the foot of a wayside cross, alongside people considered religiously or socially condemned. The boundary between sacramental inclusion and exclusion thus persisted in the treatment of the dead as well as the living.

Local belief imagined the unbaptized newborn as being in transit between worlds, unable to enter heaven or hell or return to the limbo from which it had come. In some accounts, the child’s spirit remained a protective presence in the family home. Families might preserve its cradle, leave it a place at the table, or set out a plate of food; giving its clothes or name to a later-born sibling, by contrast, was feared to invite the dead child to claim that sibling. These customs show how Catholic categories of baptism and the afterlife became entangled with household practices that neither simply reproduce nor neatly fit church doctrine.

Sacred Space and Profanation

The Church’s buildings and symbols matter in the investigation because they are targets whose meaning depends on religious practice. Jonan distinguishes cemetery-centered rites associated with traditions such as Haitian vodou, Brazilian candomblé, and Cuban palo mayombe from acts directed at Christian temples. In his account, satanists choose churches because their intended offense is aimed at God as well as at the site itself; such profanations are uncommon. More generally, desecrators may defile sacred images with bodily substances or ash, invert crucifixes, or mutilate statues to create a conspicuous and offensive display.

His example of a chapel at A Lanzada makes the contrast concrete: intruders broke into the building, cut both hands from a revered statue of the Virgin, and threw them over a cliff instead of taking the statue. The calculated damage made the act more visible and more insulting. In the Arizkun case, by contrast, the significance of damaged church furnishings lies in their connection to the old treatment of the Agotes. The sacred space is therefore not a neutral backdrop: its objects preserve the memory of who was admitted, who was separated, and who was denied access.

Religious Explanations of Evil and Modern Institutions

The novel also presents a modern theological account through Doctor Sarasola, whose claims should not be mistaken for a formal statement of Catholic Church policy. Sarasola argues that some people are not merely mentally ill but cruel and capable of taking pleasure in causing pain; in such cases, he says, evil produces or nourishes mental illness rather than mental illness explaining evil. He invokes the Church’s centuries-long inquiry into evil and contrasts it with modern psychiatry, which he accuses of treating aberrant conduct as illness and confusing explanation with excuse.

Sarasola further attacks the influence of Freud and the tendency to attribute wrongdoing to a lack of maternal love in childhood. He invokes the seven deadly sins—pride, greed, envy, anger, lust, gluttony, and sloth—as a vocabulary for recognizing moral culpability, and tells Amaia that society’s distance from God and the Church has made it less able to identify evil. Amaia’s inward response complicates the exchange: his words give a name to a fear she has carried about her mother, but his certainty also makes her distrust him. The episode presents religious language as emotionally potent without confirming Sarasola’s theory as objective truth.

That distinction becomes important when Amaia investigates the university clinic’s prison work. Prison records show therapy for Jasón Medina and Ramón Quiralte, and a report concerning the Logroño prisoner who died by suicide bears an illegible signature from a psychiatric service. Amaia finds reports signed by Sarasola without the assigned psychiatrist’s name and suspects that the clinic’s prison volunteering may have been used to identify violent inmates considered especially relevant to its interest in evil. She also confronts Sarasola over Doctor Franz’s opposition to Rosario’s transfer to the clinic and his reported intention to question him. These are investigative allegations about Sarasola and the clinic, not proof that the Catholic Church directed the program. The institution’s broader significance remains deliberately layered: it has a documented history of exclusion, supplies the sacramental framework behind local customs, and provides the moral vocabulary through which individual characters interpret—and contest—the nature of evil.