Her father Iñaki, played by Miguel Garcés, has his doubts but does not resist; her aunt Maite, played by Patricia López Arnaiz, who believes there are no gods at all, would rather see her niece at a university than in a cloister. She takes the girl's plan for a cry for help, a symptom of grief for her dead mother. The newspaper's critic agrees with the aunt: the girl has a wound; her prayer, shown late in the film, seems more a cry than an illumination. He adds that in the film a priest and the sisters spoke with the girl, a minor, for years behind her father's back, which he admits leaves him uneasy. Ainara herself says that faith is a feeling that cannot be caught in words; the director, for her part, declares that she wishes to treat difficult matters without offering easy conclusions.

You see, my lords, what is new here. Most stories of the young tell of those who want to get out: out of school, out of a cramped town, out of a strict home; this one tells of a maiden who wants to go in. What was once an honour is now a question, and is even taken for an illness. Our ancestors called a virgin consecrated to the goddess holy. Six Vestals in the city kept the undying fire; they walked with a lictor before them, they were maintained at public expense, and if one of them chanced to meet a condemned man being led to execution, his life was given him. Did anyone then say that a maiden joined to the hearth of Vesta had a wound? A city that knows how to honour the sacred sees in such a maiden a pledge of the public safety; a city that has forgotten sends for the doctor.

I am not of the same rite as those Spanish virgins; I have other hearths, other ceremonies. But this I have always professed in the Senate House: «Not by one road alone can we come to so great a mystery.» If one path to that secret runs through schools and books, and another through silence and the choir, why should this one alone be held suspect? The aunt who prefers the university also follows her own road, and I do not blame her; but whoever thinks only one road agrees with reason suffers from the very fault he blames in others, and forces everything under a single rule. «For each has his own custom, each his own rite.»

Yet I concede it, and I do not hide it: that the priest and the sisters are depicted speaking with the girl for years without her father's knowledge is something shown in a film, not in the records of a court; but not even in a film can it be praised. A Vestal was taken not by stealth but openly, in sight of the pontiffs and the city, and a priesthood conferred in public can be approved in public. A religion that deceives the household wounds the good faith of the household; a father's authority is no enemy of piety, but its first school. On this one point, then, I do not oppose the film's critic: suspicion is born of what is hidden, honour of what is open.

The greater fault, however, lies with the city, not the cloister. When a commonwealth has lost the memory of the sacred, it reduces every vocation to grief, every prayer to a cry, every chastity to fear; for it understands nothing it cannot measure. The girl says faith is not caught in words; the critic complains that the director gives her characters too many words. So a thing that consists in silence is buried under talk. If Rome herself, an aged mother, were to speak for this maiden, she would give back the words she once spoke for herself: «I will keep the rites of my forefathers, for I do not repent of them. I will live in my own way, for I am free.» Freedom is also the freedom to go into a temple, not only to go out of a house.

What, then, do I ask, my lords? I do not wish films forbidden, nor critics restrained in their taste. I ask that public custom number a sacred vocation among the honourable ways of life, not among the diseases; that a household deliberate on such a resolve openly, with the father's knowledge; that a maiden who wishes to go in be examined not by physicians, but approved by her parents and her own priests, once the lawful age has come. So good faith will be kept with the father, and piety with God. She who seeks the cloister is not blind, my lords; blind is the city that, forgetting the sacred, sees in a praying maiden nothing but a wound.