Holy See

The Holy See is presented through a tension between institutional authority and the varied ways people live their faith. Creasy sees church wealth beside poverty and questions what religious institutions can explain about suffering; an annulment case, meanwhile, shows how the Holy See’s formal process can prolong a woman’s uncertainty even as local religious practices remain part of daily life.

Hierarchy, Wealth, and Service

Creasy’s view of the Church is shaped by contrasts he cannot reconcile. During the Pope’s visit to the Philippines, where he had been, the bishops of the area gathered in Manila to meet him. A few days later, Creasy flew to Hong Kong on a plane carrying half a dozen bishops returning home. They travelled in first class and drank champagne. Against the poverty he had seen in the country, the scene sharpened his sense of a church hierarchy surrounded by wealth.

His experience also included missionaries whose lives offered a different example. In the Congo and Vietnam, he had encountered people who spent their lives working without material reward. With Guido, he once drove to a mission hospital outside Leopoldville to tell four Belgian nuns that the approaching simbas made the hospital impossible to protect. The nuns refused to leave their patients. One young nun faced Creasy’s warning that she would suffer and die with fear but resolve, and answered serenely. When Creasy and Guido returned after their unit had retreated, they found the nuns dead and buried what remained of them. Creasy later killed many of the simbas in a prolonged act of violence, but the experience did not resolve his questions about faith, justice, or the Church’s hierarchy.

Faith and the Problem of Suffering

Creasy’s doubts arise from the suffering he has witnessed, not simply from abstract disagreement. He cannot understand how a benevolent God could permit innocents to die in war, or how faith could account for the suffering of a child or a young woman subjected to repeated violence. The existence of cruel people who live long lives while their victims suffer makes divine justice seem incoherent to him.

The bishops’ champagne remains one side of his contradiction; the nuns’ decision to stay with their patients is another. Creasy wonders whether faith is a test and, if so, who is administering it. He asks whether bishops or officials of the Holy See can judge such a test, while recognizing that he has met people whose intellect and faith coexist. He cannot make those examples add up to a settled belief. The novel therefore presents the Holy See within Creasy’s unresolved questioning, rather than as an institution that supplies an answer to it.

Annulment and Institutional Procedure

The Holy See also enters the plot through a marriage annulment. After returning to Malta, the woman applies to have her marriage annulled. The Cowboy, who had married the couple, forwards the papers to the Holy See and tries to explain the process. Witnesses must be found, depositions taken, and anonymous judges must decide the case; the proceedings may take years.

That delay has an immediate personal cost. The woman is twenty-six and wants the possibility of an ordinary life, including marriage and children, but she does not know whether a local man would marry her after the community’s talk or whether she could bear to leave Malta. Even a successful annulment would not settle those questions. She returns to her family home for its steadiness and security, placing her hope in familiar people and land while the formal decision remains pending. The institution’s procedure is described in terms of sacred marriage and judicial process, but the passage emphasizes the distance between that process and the pain of the person waiting for its outcome.

Institutional Religion and Everyday Practice

The novel sets formal procedure alongside religious acts embedded in local life. Laura goes to early Mass at five and says that someone must pray for the sinners in her family. When Creasy asks her to pray for him too, she nods seriously and looks at the small gold crucifix he wears. The crucifix had been given to him by Pinta, who had saved her own money to buy it; it brings his private doubts into contact with the faith practiced around him.

Confession provides another glimpse of that everyday religious world. Salvu attends the church in Nadur each Sunday and deliberately tells The Cowboy outrageous stories to provoke him. Laura explains that the confessional is secret: The Cowboy does not disclose what he hears, while Salvu himself boasts about his confessions. Later, The Cowboy is puzzled by the Schembri girl’s new habit of attending early Mass and praying every day without entering the confessional. When someone suggests that another person must confess, he answers that no one can confess on someone else’s behalf. These scenes do not describe the Holy See’s annulment machinery; they show the distinct place of prayer, confession, and personal conscience in the community where its institutional authority is also felt.