The church you write about in this novel is challenged by corruption within its ranks. This story deals with the illegal removal of a dead Pope's diary and its sale to the newspapers and with the failure of an Archbishop to stop the disappearances in Argentina, indeed to confer with the perpetrators rather than with the oppressed. And yet you still seem, at the end of this novel, to have hope in the church as an institution, even with all of this dealing with corruption and with human vices within the church, you still have hope that the church is an institution that should continue. Well I have hope in human nature and in the workings of the divine spirit in human nature.
All institutions are prone to corruption and to the vices of their members.
None of us is guaranteed against failure or corruption of any kind, witness what's going on in the world in this moment, the follies of human nature and the failures of human nature. Now you can't abdicate the human family unless you want to blow your brains out, you have to accept the human family for what it is, just the same as you have to accept yourself for what you are and try to improve it. You know one of the causes of modern despair is the fact that we have had proposed to us, from various quarters, an impossible perfection. You know, 'if you become the perfect Marxist you have a perfect society', 'become a perfect fascist you have a perfectly controlled society'. It's all nonsense.