After 36 years in which he has baptised most people in this tranquil village near Bilbao, Father Larrinaga told the crowded church he had been hounded out by a local council which had turned him into a terrorist target for the armed Basque separatist group Eta.
"I have defined myself as an opponent of terrorism and that is why I have been persecuted," he told the faithful during his sermon.
His departure from Maruri marked a new peak in an increasingly bitter battle between the Madrid government of the conservative prime minister Jose Maria Aznar and the non-violent Basque Nationalist party which runs the region's semi-autonomous government.
Father Larrinaga's supporters claimed his "expulsion" from Maruri was part of a sinister campaign of political cleansing being carried out by the Basque Nationalist party, which controls the local council, with the implicit support of Eta.
They said the priest's criticisms of Eta and his broadsides against both Basque Nationalist party leader Xavier Arzalluz and the largely nationalist-friendly Basque church for being soft on terrorism had led to his being driven out.
His name, they said, could now be added to a long list of non-nationalist academics, journalists, politicians and businessmen forced to leave the Basque country because their lives were threatened by Eta or made unbearable by the nationalists.
"Today both Eta and Arzalluz are rubbing their hands because they have managed to drive out someone who does not think like them," Carlos Iturgaiz, a regional leader of Mr Aznar's People's party, declared as he walked into the Maruri church yesterday.
For Basque nationalists, however, the Larrinaga affair was the result of a campaign directed against them by Mr Aznar. Mr Aznar, they claimed, was trying to dirty their party's name by suggesting it was hand-in-hand with Eta, hell-bent on creating an ethnically and politically pure Basque state cleansed of those who would rather be Spanish.
The priest had been sucked into that campaign, they said, turning him into a political figure whose ideas were diametrically opposed to those of his parishioners.
Father Larrinaga's problems started last year when, as head of a group of Basque clerics campaigning for a tougher church line against Eta, he gave a newspaper interview denouncing what he saw as the complicity of Basque nationalists with the terrorists.
Maruri's Basque nationalist mayor, Joseba Alzaga, sent a letter to every household accusing the priest of showing "nostalgia for the [former dictator] General Franco".
Father Larrinaga's reply was to claim that the mayor's words had, effectively, placed him on Eta's hit list.
He requested, and got, an interior ministry bodyguard - a standard measure of protection given to outspoken critics of Eta in the Basque country.
Eta has killed more than 800 people over the past 30 years and has recently targeted academics and journalists who are outspoken critics. It has never, however, attacked a priest.
"Larrinaga is either being paranoid or vain," replied Mr Arzalluz.
Most of the village - which overwhelmingly votes Basque Nationalist and where even church services are in the local language of euskara - turned against him.
There were protests outside the church on Sundays and a boycott of his services.
With no children arriving for catechism classes and only a handful of people at Sunday Mass, he finally decided to quit.
Yesterday it was hard to find anyone in Maruri prepared to support their priest in public. "He is a nice man. But sometimes you should just keep your politics to yourself.
"The older people are specially upset," explained Estanislao Fernandez.
In the Jan-Toki Iruna bar clients accused Father Larrinaga of lying.
"He would show people photographs of pro-Eta graffiti and say they came from here.
"But you don't get that in Maruri," said one.
"He should have stayed away from politics. I wonder who put him up to it?" asked another.
Father Larrinaga's accusation that people in the town were too cowed to protest against Mayor Alzaga's nationalists was, however, born out by the handful of parishioners who went to Mass yesterday but fled from the press.
"Don't talk to me about it. He has done many good things for me over the past 36 years," said one woman who burst into tears.
"I have kept coming to Mass every Sunday.
"I'd better not talk about it though, otherwise you know what happens," explained an elderly man in a large black Basque beret as he symbolically zipped his lips closed.