Religious Theater and Hidden Corruption — Noli Me Tángere

After Mass Fray Salvi sulks while Sisterhood women compete in indulgence accounting, flipping coins to assign years in purgatory and punishing servants for broken plates with fines that buy more plenary indulgences. Sisa arrives with vegetables and flowers to placate the curate and fetch Crispin, only to learn the cook and servants accuse the boy of theft and flight with two gold pieces missing from the sacristy.

The Civil Guard has been sent; mockery follows her faithful-wife reputation. She is pushed toward the street as the sisters gossip about Salvi's illness and the cost of broken china upstairs while a missing child becomes kitchen scandal and public entertainment for women who never met him yet judge his mother in the courtyard.

Rizal juxtaposes comic bookkeeping of souls with a mother's collapse: the same rectory that sells grace by the indulgence destroys a family with an unproved charge. Religious theater upstairs, predation in the kitchen, and a mother turned away without her son while coins decide purgatory and servants decide guilt without trial or witness. No one offers to search the forest or question the sacristan who detained him. No one offers to search the forest or question the sacristan who detained him.