When His Excellency Don Alfonso Cañaveral honored him by naming him the parish priest of San Juan, he did not think he had been sent to a pagan land. Nevertheless, from the day of his arrival in the capital town of the municipality of San Juan Chamula he could see that he was in a world where the truths of Christianity had been corrupted by ignorance and had degenerated into crude rituals, barbaric superstitions.

The language made it difficult to penetrate his parishioners’ souls; though he made an effort to learn it, it could never be very useful to him in an empty church, a closed confessional. He tried other approaches. But the Indian turned to the brujo, trusted the pulsetaker, and yielded to the priest no more than a certain sum of alms in which the soul was in no way committed.

That state of affairs was serious but not insoluble. The appearance of the idols at Tzajal-hemel complicated it further. Padre Mandujano praised the zeal and acumen of his sacristan, Xaw Ramírez Paciencia, discoverer of the cult the Chamulas were paying to those idols, as well as the loyalty he had faithfully shown to the Holy Mother, whom he had served since his earliest youth. As far as his own role in the events was concerned, the priest gave himself no other merit than that of having proceeded rapidly to confront a threat which did menace the security of the State, he acknowledged, though that aspect of the matter was not his ultimate concern, but also and above all which menaced the authority of the Church. Before concluding, he did not fail to make a veiled allusion to the secular powers’ abusive intervention in problems such as this which fell exclusively under the jurisdiction of the Church.

Far from satisfying its audience, Padre Mandujano’s declaration disconcerted them. Why such mildness in pointing to the responsibility of the guilty parties? Why these distinctions between the sacred and the profane, which were beside the point?

The prosecuting lawyer requested leave of the court to ask the priest a few questions before he left the witness stand. The request was granted, and the lawyer spoke as follows:

Padre Mandujano had lived among the Chamulas for some time; did he think they were capable of the kind of wickedness it would take to dig up idols and revive ancient ceremonies?

The priest of San Juan smiled condescendingly before answering that the idea did seem absurd to him, though, of course, he did not see how else the events could have occurred.

The theory of the pernicious influence of a Ladino, a man of reason, was unacceptable?

Padre Mandujano had to accept that that hypothesis seemed more plausible. Because yes, in fact, the soul of the Indians is too dull to invent a new form of idolatry, too stupid to remember the customs of their ancestors.