Church of Nuestro Señor Jesucristo

The Church of Nuestro Señor Jesucristo, an eighteenth-century church in Colonia Reforma, becomes the setting for the most violent episode in the Penitent’s attacks on churches. Its history as the oldest church in Santa Teresa and a former seat of the diocese stands in sharp contrast to the nighttime assault that leaves Father Juan Carrasco and the caretaker dead and the investigation struggling to anticipate the attacker’s next move.

Setting and History

The church was built in the mid-eighteenth century and had once served as the seat of the Diocese of Santa Teresa. It stood in Colonia Reforma, connected by a passageway to an adjacent building where three priests and two Papago seminarians lived. The seminarians studied anthropology and history at the University of Santa Teresa and also performed routine tasks for the priests, including washing dishes and taking laundry to be washed.

The building’s history is layered with earlier conflict. Local accounts held that a second underground passageway had been used by priests during the Revolution and the Cristero War, although one of the seminarians had never heard of it. The church is thus presented not only as a place of worship, but as a structure marked by changing uses and remembered danger.

The Penitent’s Attack

Three days after the desecration of Santa Catalina, the Penitent entered the church in the early morning. One seminarian, awake in the adjacent building, heard breaking glass and then sounds from inside the church. He first woke his fellow seminarian; together they discreetly alerted Father Juan Carrasco. Carrasco recognized the likely source from news reports, dressed, took an old baseball bat from a cupboard, and went toward the church with the seminarian who had raised the alarm.

At first they saw no one. When they heard the attacker, Carrasco advanced toward the sound, while the seminarian stopped, unable to follow. The seminarian later described hearing the bat strike, voices and footsteps, and the caretaker arriving. The account does not establish every detail of what happened in the darkness; it conveys the episode through the witness’s fragmented perceptions and the fear that prevented him from moving forward.

The Penitent also damaged a wooden carving of the Archangel Gabriel, knocking it from its pedestal. By the time more priests and the police arrived, Father Carrasco and the caretaker were dead. Inspector Jose Marquez described the attack as a departure from the Penitent’s earlier pattern: this time the attacker had gone berserk.

Investigation and Significance

After examining the church and the route outside, Inspector Juan de Dios Martinez argued that the Penitent could not travel between distant locations on foot without attracting attention. He inferred that the attacker used a car and might keep a change of clothes in it, since the attacks left him marked by a distinctive smell. The police chief considered the possibility that the attacker changed before returning home; the discussion remained a set of investigative hypotheses, not an identification of the culprit.

Martinez proposed placing an officer in each church and waiting for the Penitent’s next move. But the church attacks were only one demand on a small police force: the investigation would later be deprioritized when Martinez was assigned to armed robberies and the Penitent case stalled. The church’s episode therefore exposes both the escalation of the attacks and the limits of a response organized around waiting for the next crime. Its sacred setting does not protect those inside; instead, the old church becomes another vulnerable site in a city where violence repeatedly outpaces institutional action.