Vatican

The Vatican is presented as a powerful institution whose interest in Doctor Berasategui’s psychiatric records reaches beyond the police investigation into his crimes. Through Sarasola, Amaia Salazar learns that Vatican authorities removed a separate collection of encrypted case files to Rome, asserting ecclesiastical authority over material they considered too disturbing for public scrutiny. The disclosure also places that intervention within the Vatican’s stated concern about violent sects and the pursuit of what Sarasola calls the “matiz del mal.”

Interest in Berasategui’s Records

Sarasola explains that Doctor Berasategui maintained a detailed encrypted file on every case he had handled, both at the clinic and in private practice, including the Esparza case. When Berasategui was arrested for his involvement in Rosario’s release and the crimes known as the Tarttalo cases, senior Vatican authorities took an interest. Sarasola says that psychiatry can serve as a route to identifying cases with the particular quality the institution seeks to investigate.

Berasategui, Sarasola adds, had made important advances in this field but kept them hidden. After the case became public, the Vatican authorities reviewed his files and separated some from the rest. They judged these records irrelevant to the police inquiry but disturbing and difficult for the general public to absorb. The files were transferred to Rome for security. Sarasola says he does not possess them, making clear that the police cannot simply obtain the material through him.

Ecclesiastical Authority and Police Evidence

Amaia objects that evidence from a case has been taken away. Sarasola answers that, in these matters, ecclesiastical authority stands above police authority, and that the files left the country in a diplomatic bag. His account makes the transfer more than a question of custody: it exposes a jurisdictional conflict in which the institution’s own assessment of the records overrides the needs of the criminal investigation.

Sarasola does not present the disclosure as routine. He says he deliberated before telling Amaia, and connects his decision to her previous inquiry about Inguma. The files’ removal and his later warning therefore become part of the same conversation: the Vatican’s interest in Berasategui’s work is tied, in Sarasola’s explanation, to a broader concern about the activity of sects.

Assessment of Sect Activity

Sarasola reports that the Vatican had recently appointed eight new exorcists authorized to work in Spain, insisting that the appointments were not casual. He says the institution was concerned about the proliferation of groups and sects across the country and gives a total of sixty-eight active groups. In his account, the groups are divided by the harm they cause: group A includes collectives that do not injure members physically or financially, while groups B and C are associated with economic, psychological, and physical harm, including violence, forced prostitution, weapons and drug activity, and trafficking in children and women.

At the most violent end of this classification, group D consists of satanic sects whose violence culminates in murder understood not as a business but as an offering or sacrifice to evil. Sarasola attributes the emergence of such groups to different circumstances: some brought practices such as voodoo and Santeria from their countries of origin, while others arose amid economic and moral crisis, exploiting people’s desperation and desire to improve their circumstances. These claims are presented through Sarasola’s explanation of the Vatican’s concern, not as an independent account of every group in the country.

Narrative Significance

The Vatican’s role complicates the boundary between investigation and authority. Its officials possess information about Berasategui’s cases, classify some of that information as unsuitable for police or public access, and move it beyond the country through diplomatic channels. At the same time, the institution’s attention to sects and exorcism gives Sarasola a framework for explaining why the crimes and the question of Inguma have drawn its interest. For Amaia, however, that framework cannot substitute for evidence: the records she needs have been withheld from the investigation under an authority she is told she cannot challenge.