Priest’s strange death shocks Spanish city

When a friend came calling on Father Alfonso Benito López on Tuesday in the Old City of Valencia, the janitor of the building went looking for him, only to find the 80-year-old priest lying dead on his bed, in his pajamas.


With no signs of forced entry or of a struggle in the apartment, and no visible wounds on the body, it would have been easy to conclude that the priest had died of natural causes, at least a couple of days earlier, given the condition of his corpse.

So you can imagine how surprised the janitor must have been to receive a text message only a few minutes later, which was supposedly sent from the priest lying dead in front of him.

Police later ascertained that several other friends and acquaintances had received similar messages over the previous days, all seemingly sent after Fr. Lopez had died.

After the janitor received a text message from the dead priest, his death been treated by police as a homicide, to the shock of the good citizens of Valencia, an ancient and beautiful city that sits on Spain’s Mediterranean coast.

“People have been quite astonished”, said Lucia Ballester, a journalist with Aid to the Church in Need International, who is originally from Valencia.

“Everyone is finding it very strange, like something out of a movie. My grandmother even mentioned [the Umberto Ecco novel] ‘The name of the Rose’”.

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