Catholic Church

The Catholic Church occupies an uneasy position in the novel’s world: it can speak with spiritual authority against violence, yet Don Adán Barrera assumes that its institutions can be courted with money, gifts, and access. Its presence ranges from a cathedral and the sacrament of confession to a public broadcast pleading for a hostage’s release, and even into the novel’s account of a sprawling covert network. The contrast is not resolved into a simple portrait of either moral independence or complicity; instead, the Church’s authority is shown as consequential precisely because political and criminal powers seek to reach it.

Institutional Authority and Patronage

Don Adán’s confidence that the Church can be bought appears in his plans to marry Pilar Talavera. He imagines approaching the cardinal with offers to build a hospital, a school, and an orphanage, and expects that the couple will be able to marry in a cathedral. The proposed gifts would serve public purposes, but Don Adán treats them as means of securing institutional approval. The episode makes the Church an object of negotiation in his larger effort to convert wealth into recognition and legitimacy.

That expectation belongs to a broader political world in which protection, money, and access are exchanged as instruments of power. At a meeting with García Abrego, Don Adán presents the Federación as a source of protection and friendship in return for a fee, while conceiving Guadalajara as a safe base for the organization. The Church is not shown making that arrangement; the parallel instead clarifies the logic Don Adán brings to it. He assumes that an institution with its own authority can be approached as another powerful party whose consent may be obtained through valuable benefits.

Confession and Bishop Juan Parada

The Church’s authority is not only material or ceremonial. Nine years after their earlier acquaintance, Art Keller encounters Bishop Juan Parada in a cathedral. Parada has changed little, retaining the intensity of his gray eyes despite the years. When he observes that Art is praying despite not believing in God, Art answers that he will do anything. Parada offers to hear his confession, but Art says there is no time.

The exchange gives the sacrament a practical urgency: Art is not presented as having returned to belief, but as seeking help under pressure. Parada’s response is immediate. He accompanies Art to a radio station and broadcasts an appeal to the people who have kidnapped the American policeman. He invokes God, Jesus Christ, Mary, and the saints, urging the kidnappers to consider their souls and release the man unharmed. He threatens excommunication if they harm the hostage, condemns them to eternal hell, and then returns to the possibility of salvation. The broadcast joins spiritual judgment to a concrete demand: release the captive and return to God. Parada’s intervention makes ecclesiastical authority audible beyond the cathedral, addressed directly to people holding a life in their hands.

Public Intervention and Moral Pressure

Parada’s appeal is notable for using both sides of the Church’s authority. Excommunication and damnation establish the cost of refusing his demand; the repeated offer of salvation leaves open a path back. The broadcast does not merely condemn the kidnappers from a distance. It asks them to act, and presents the hostage’s release as a possibility that could also restore the captors’ relationship with God. In the surrounding scene, Antonio Ramos begins to report that the broadcast has produced an address, connecting Parada’s intervention to the effort to locate the kidnapped man.

The Church thus functions as a moral intermediary in a crisis where ordinary appeals have not secured the hostage’s freedom. Parada’s spiritual office gives him a language and public standing distinct from the police operation, yet the appeal is directed toward an immediate physical outcome. The episode places religious persuasion beside law enforcement without making them identical: the priest threatens spiritual consequences and offers absolution, while the effort to recover the policeman depends on finding where he is being held.

The Church in the Wider Network

The Church also appears in the novel’s account of Red Mist, a code name for the coordination of operations intended to neutralize left-wing movements across Latin America. Sal Scachi’s role is to share intelligence, distribute assets, coordinate targets, and prevent separate operations from interfering with one another. The network is described as encompassing right-wing militias and their drug-lord sponsors, army officers and troops, intelligence agencies, and police forces; the account then adds the Church to that expansive list. It does not specify what the Church did within Red Mist, or whether the reference concerns particular clergy, institutional participation, or some other connection. The breadth of the list is clear, but the Church’s precise role is not.

That juxtaposition complicates the force of Parada’s public appeal. Elsewhere, a bishop uses the Church’s standing to oppose harm and press for a captive’s release; in the account of Red Mist, the Church appears within a transnational landscape of anti-left operations and coercive power, without an explanation of its part. Alongside Don Adán’s expectation that religious approval can be purchased, these appearances make the Church a contested source of influence: a spiritual authority sought by criminal power, capable of intervening in an immediate danger, and situated within political networks whose operations the narrative does not fully clarify.