The most frequently analysed characters in Pedro Páramo are Juan Preciado, the eponymous cacique, and his unrequited love, Susana San Juan. These figures provoke debates on identity, power, patriarchy, violence and gender as well as opening doors to analyses of Rulfo's style and narrative structure. It is surprising, however, that so little has been written on one of the central characters of that novel: the priest, el padre Rentería. The characterisation of Rentería brings similar themes to the attention of the reader and, most importantly, provides a vehicle for Rulfo's multi-layered irony. Fragment 14 of the novel, the first in which we meet this character, is a densely dramatic introduction to Rentería's role as the priest of Comala, the ghost town that is the setting for Pedro Páramo. Verbal and situational irony in this fragment, in its (centrifugal) relationship with the rhetoric of Church and state in the post-Revolutionary era, is the focus of this chapter.

One major exception to the dearth of critical analysis is José C. González Boixo's article ‘El factor religioso en la obra de Juan Rulfo’ which, in fact, acknowledges two situational ironies in the characterisation of the priest. Firstly, the doubt-ridden priest in a community of souls desperate for salvation is a situational irony in itself: ‘resulta intencionadamente paradójico que sea él, el pastor de almas, quien no tenga esa seguridad que debe infundir en los demás’. Secondly, the doubt which stems from Rentería’s complicity with the cacique (‘La iglesia aparece como cooperadora de las obras violentas, bien porque esté unida a los ricos, bien porque contribuya al mantenimiento de este tipo de sociedad’) is expressed through support of the Church in the Church–state war of 1926–29 (the Cristero War) for, as González Boixo tells us, ‘la antítesis de la duda es el fanatismo’.