Roman Catholic Church

In Poor Things, the Roman Catholic Church becomes a place where Duncan Wedderburn tries to interpret his guilt and decide what to do about Bella. His encounter with a cathedral, a shrine, and an English-speaking priest gives him ritual and practical counsel at a moment of emotional crisis; it also leaves open whether his sudden resolve to embrace Catholicism will endure. The episode’s religious seriousness is repeatedly unsettled by the comic way Archibald McCandless presents it.

The Church as a Place of Refuge

Wedderburn’s approach to the Church follows a domestic and financial crisis. On returning to Glasgow, he discovers that his mother is nearly destitute, that she can afford to keep only Auld Jessy and the cook, and that both servants are themselves in desperate circumstances. He directs his guilt and rage chiefly at Bella, blaming her for the loss of his money and remembering their relationship as a source of suffering. Crossing a busy bridge, he stops before a cathedral and enters, despite having never before gone into a Roman Catholic place of worship. His question about whether God has guided him there conveys a hope he cannot yet explain.

The cathedral’s pillars, dimness, altar, and stained glass make the setting feel sharply removed from the streets and domestic troubles outside. Yet the scene does not establish a doctrine or give a general account of Catholic worship. It records Wedderburn’s particular attempt to find help. He puts a centime into a box, lights a candle, places it before the altar, and prays to the First Mover, blaming Bella while asking for assistance. The devotional gesture is at once earnest and self-interested: he seeks a spiritual answer, but frames his distress around his own conduct and the woman he resents.

Prayer, the Shrine, and Confession

Wedderburn reads a shaft of sunlight through the stained glass as a personal message. A crimson heart-shaped pane casts a pink shadow across his white silk waistcoat, giving the episode’s spiritual sign a conspicuously material and faintly comic form. The priest later explains that those who pray before the shrine receive this kind of message when the sunlight comes from a certain direction, and that its meaning is good when properly understood. The account thus leaves room for both religious interpretation and coincidence: Wedderburn experiences the light as addressed to him, while the priest describes a recurring effect of the shrine.

Seeking somewhere private to think, Wedderburn mistakenly enters a confessional. Once he realizes where he is, he wants to confess sins extending from childhood to the recent episode in which Bella booked him into what sounded like a brothel. He also asks for professional advice about the light he has just seen. The priest speaks English and listens, but refuses absolution because he considers Wedderburn a heretic or pagan. Instead, he offers an opinion after hearing a concise account of the sins troubling him. The exchange defines the Church’s presence here through a specific pastoral encounter: the priest draws a boundary around the sacrament while still agreeing to hear and advise a distressed visitor.

Counsel and Its Immediate Consequences

The priest’s advice is bluntly practical. Wedderburn should marry Bella and return to his mother, leave Bella and return to his mother, or face damnation. He is also advised to receive instruction in the Catholic faith when he gets back to Glasgow. The counsel does not settle Bella’s future for him; it makes the alternatives explicit and turns his diffuse remorse into a choice about marriage, separation, and home. The mixture of spiritual warning and ordinary domestic direction gives the scene its distinctive balance of solemnity and comedy.

After leaving the cathedral, Wedderburn feels as though a burden has fallen from his shoulders. At the hotel he tells Bella that he must return to Glasgow and work, and that he cannot take her with him unless she returns as his wife. Bella is cheerful about staying in Paris. She packs his things, gives him his fare, and, when he asks whether that is all, removes £500 in Bank of England notes from the lining of her travelling coat. Her generosity makes the separation materially possible, but it also sharply contrasts with the self-absorption that brought Wedderburn to the cathedral. The priest’s counsel accompanies his decision to leave; the episode does not present the Church as causing Bella’s response or dictating the terms of their parting.

Conversion as Promise and Narrative Irony

Wedderburn’s later letter shows that the encounter has become part of a larger attempt to remake himself. Lonely in Glasgow, he describes hiding in the kitchen with Auld Jessy and the cook, sleeping between them because he cannot sleep alone, and asking Bella to return. He then announces a proposed new life: he will restore his mother’s fortunes through conveyancing, campaign against the Modern Babylon in public and in the press, and embrace Catholicism, vow eternal chastity, and end his days in a cloister. These are intentions he announces, not outcomes the account confirms. His appeal to the Church therefore remains entangled with homesickness, regret, and an urgent desire for rescue.

The episode is also filtered through McCandless’s presentation of Wedderburn’s account. McCandless interrupts the description of the cathedral to mock its derivative style and summarize what follows, then returns to the letter. That framing makes the religious episode double-edged: Wedderburn experiences the Church as a possible source of absolution and direction, while the reader encounters that experience through a narrator who punctures its elevated language. The Church’s narrative significance lies in this unresolved conjunction. Its rites and priest offer Wedderburn a vocabulary for guilt and a path he may choose, but his subsequent plans remain entangled with the worldly losses, romantic attachments, and comic self-dramatization from which he hoped to escape.