Methol has spoken about his faith in multiple interviews and in the accounts that exist of the survival period. He was, by his own description, a man whose Catholic faith gave him a framework for understanding what had happened to him — not an explanation, not a justification, but a framework. He had not deserved to lose his wife. He had not deserved to survive. The world was not organized by what people deserved. Faith was not a contract.
He returned to Uruguay after the rescue and went back to the cigarette business that his family ran. He spoke publicly about the survival experience throughout his life, emphasizing the spiritual and human dimensions of what the group had been through. He died of cancer in 2016, the first of the sixteen survivors to die — 44 years after the crash.
The relationship between faith and survival at the crash site is a thread that runs through most survivor accounts. The majority of the survivors were practicing Catholics. The religious framework — the comparison to Eucharist, the prayers they said together at night inside the fuselage, the conviction that God had not abandoned them — was a genuine part of how the group sustained itself psychologically. It coexisted with the practical and medical thinking that Canessa and Zerbino brought, with the leadership structures that emerged and shifted, and with the occasional despair that anyone who was honest about the experience acknowledges was also present.
The faith dimension is not a comforting narrative gloss applied after the fact. It is, by the accounts of the people who were there, a real part of what sustained them. It is also not the whole story, as none of the survivors has suggested that prayer alone was sufficient for survival. What they describe is an integrated experience in which the spiritual and the practical were simultaneously present and mutually reinforcing.