Treatment of Religion and the Church in Pedro Paramo and Fifth Business

Christianity has become, in over two millennia, the world’s largest religion, spreading to almost every corner of the world. Based on this fact, it does not come as much of a surprise that Juan Rulfo’s 1955 Mexican novel, Pedro Paramo, and Robertson Davies’ 1970 Canadian one, Fifth Business, are both largely affected by this pervasive religion. What is interesting, however, is that despite the vast differences in culture and time, a comparison can be made of the authors’ treatment of Christianity and the church in the books, which both come to similar conclusions.

The first major similarity in the books on this particular subject is that both Rulfo and Davies show Christianity and the church as being flawed. Father Renteria, the local priest in Pedro Paramo, is the town of Comala’s sole manifestation of the Catholic Church, a position demanding purity and integrity. However, the death of Miguel Paramo, Pedro Paramo’s sinful son, reduces Renteria into a cowardly and avaricious man “…too afraid to offend the people who provide for [him].” 1 Miguel Paramo killed Renteria’s brother, and raped his niece Ana, and at Miguel’s death, Renteria, who was performing the final ceremony, refuses to offer a final benediction. Later, though, Pedro Paramo offers Renteria a handful of gold coins and tells him, “Weigh him and forgive him as perhaps God has forgiven him.” 2 Renteria accepts the offer and pardons Miguel, yet refuses to pardon Eduviges Dyada, a law-abiding good-natured woman who’d committed suicide, because her sister Maria Dyada did not have enough money.

Renteria is transformed from a pious and devout leader to a man so steeped in sin that a fellow priest refuses him absolution after confession, because, as other priest tells Renteria, “A man . . has destroyed your church and you have allowed him to do it.” 3 By becoming a priest whose services can be had for monetary reimbursement rather than genuine faith, Renteria is used by Rulfo to represent a flawed church allowing Pedro Paramo’s tyranny to permeate even religion.

In Fifth Business, Davies also portrays flaws in Christianity. What is different is that Davies doesn’t necessarily show the imperfections of the church, but rather the shortcomings of the religion itself. Dunstan Ramsay, the main character, grows up in a Presbytarian family in the highly religious town of Deptford, Ontario and his lifelong fascination with religion and spirituality begins when he dodges a snowball with a stone hidden inside thrown by his friend (and enemy) Boy Staunton. The snowball instead hits Mary Dempster, the pregnant wife of the Baptist minister Amasa Dempster, bringing about the premature birth of her son, Paul Dempster. The untimely birth leaves Paul frail and weak, and Mary Dempster mentally infirm according to the prejudiced townspeople, both conditions for which Dunstan feels guilty about for his entire life. As Dunstan is required to care for Mrs. Dempster soon after Paul’s birth, he becomes fascinated with her mostly because of her difference from the other women in the town.

Although the hard-willed, no-nonsense townspeople never thought highly of the gentle and weak Mary Dempster, their opinion of her reaches its lowest possible after she’s found copulating with a tramp in the town’s gravel pit. The town shows its cruelty towards her ostracizing her and Paul from society. Mary Dempster is also mistreated by her overly religious husband, who ties her up inside their house preventing her from leaving it and constantly asks God to help him bear his wife. While the entire town, including Amasa Dempster, believes that Mary Dempster is “simple”, Dunstan believes she is saintly. He sees her perform what he calls three “miracles” and realizes that, “It was impossible to talk to her for long without being aware that she was wholly religious and . . .lived in a world of trust that had nothing of the stricken, lifeless, unreal quality of religion about it. She knew she was in disgrace with the world, but did not feel disgrace; she knew she was jeered at, but felt no humiliation. She lived by a light that arose from within.” 4 It is because of the failure of such a religious town to realize what Dunstan perceives as the saintly qualities of Mrs. Dempster as well as his family’s and church’s failure to understand his interests in saints and magic that force him to realize one flaw of the Christian religion: its inability to capture the entire feeling of spirituality.

One of the major faults that Rulfo portrays of the Church in Pedro Paramo, is that it fails in its main responsibility of providing moral standards to the people of Comala. The novel illustrates characters that have sinned more than any other, yet show little or no guilt. Rulfo’s book contains a careful listing of the cruelties that the Paramos inflicted on the people of Comala: “ ’Rumor has it that your