For this week’s Translation Tuesday, we present a short story by Chilean writer Sara Munizaga, translated from Spanish by the author herself. In it, a Catholic priest reflects on the frustrations of his vocation, recounting numerous examples of so-called believers whose behavior belies their professed faith. His suppressed anger conflicts with his desire to embody God’s all-encompassing forgiveness. This all comes to a head when he is asked to officiate the wedding of Jessica, a former object of infatuation who, in his telling, led him on and then cruelly rejected him. Munizaga’s story is a cynical and clever exploration of religion, gender relations, and above all, the self-deceptions that control our lives.
This vocation makes you indolent: deaths, births, and people in general cease to matter, because nothing is more demoralizing to the soul than speaking of God’s love to those who are not listening. We know they come here, to the church, as a last resort—without hope and without any genuine desire to hear the Lord’s message.
They convert to religion at the last minute, under pressure, for on their deathbeds they have no salvation plan other than the one I can give them. I feel their trembling hands clutch at my cassock, trying to keep the fate of a hell they so carelessly secured for themselves from swallowing them whole. Now they fear facing the devil when death is imminent, but when they were healthy they felt immortal and could not be bothered to live virtuously or serve others.
For that reason I spare no one in my funeral sermons. It is the only time I obtain an audience held captive by grief, and I lecture them with tedious catechism texts as a punishment for their superficial and agnostic lives. I am unmoved by the widow’s inconsolable weeping or the mourners’ emotional speeches. I know they are hypocrisy; and I will not worship any god but the God of truth, my Lord Jesus Christ. It is so simple to understand: one need only look at the life of Doña Patricia. Five children, twenty-five grandchildren, six great-grandchildren, and every day she arrived alone at the noon mass, accompanied only by a nurse hired by the family—who preferred to pay a stranger to take charge of the woman who gave them everything. The Christmas before last, Doña Patricia confessed to me that she had kept all her relatives’ gifts, still wrapped, there at the nursing home where she lived; her family never came to see her, and she was left alone during the holidays. And yet, a year later, at her funeral, the church was overflowing—not a single seat left empty. Then she achieved the full attendance she would have desired. I wanted to have the nerve to throw those still-wrapped gifts at their faces from the very altar, but that is not the Lord’s way. He is almighty and teaches us to find forgiveness. A greater crisis will come to that family that will rouse them from the selfish stupor in which they conduct their lives.