What attitudes is Marquez criticizing?

With no fixed truth to his short story "A Very Old man
with Emormous Wings," Gabriel Marquez complicates readers' efforts to assign
explanations and morals to his narrative.  Thus, with his depiction of characters,
Marquez, in effect, satirizes the adherence to conventional wisdom, religious beliefs,
and superstition.

Conventional
wisdom

Pelayo and Elisenda, his wife, are
initially frightened by the old man lying face down in mud, impeded by his enormous
wings.  But, later

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They looked at him so long and so closely
that....very soon overcame their surprise and in the end found him very
familiar.

Once he is familiar
to them, he is part of their world.  So, Elisenda decides to charge admission to see him
and make money.  When this money-making venture succeeds, she is happy, but later
Elisenda wearies of the old man's presence and wishes him gone because he is no longer
popular.

When the people come to see the old man with
enormous wings, they cannot understand him and are nonplussed, but after the appearance
of the spider woman with the human head arrives and the people recognize the humanity in
her and are allowed to ask her questions, the people feel
that 

[A]
spectacle like that, full of so much human truth and with such a fearful lesson, was
bound to defeat without every trying that of a haughty angel who scarcely deigned to
look at
mortals.

Superstition

After
the neighbor woman is called upon by Pelayo and Elisenda to interpret the meaning of
their strange guest, the old man is declared an angel who has been knocked down by the
rain because he is so enfeebled and old. She suggests that this angel be beated to death
because it is a "fugitive survivor of a celestial conspiracy"; however, Pelayo and his
wife do not have the heart to kill him.

The superstition
attached to the angel makes Pelayo and Elisenda famous.  Yet, it also frustrates
Elisenda who cries that "it was awful living in that hell full of angels" with an old
one who is "delirious with the tongue twisters of an old
Norwegian."

Religion

Since
Marquez's Colombia has a mixture of superstition with religion, a priest is soon called
upon to interpret the arrival of the angel.  Father Gonzaga is reluctant to make any
pronouncements on his own after the angel does not respond to Latin which every
celestial being should know.  Suspecting that the angel is an impostor, Father Gonzaga
reminds Pelayo and Elisenda that the devil uses carnival tricks to confuse the unwary.
He informs them that he will write a letter to his bishop so that he will write to the
"Supreme Pontiff in order to get the final verdict from the highest courts." With this
advice, Marquez clearly satirizes the bureaucratic hierarchy of the Catholic
Church.

Along with these three areas of satire, with the
subtitle being "A Tale for Children" Marquez suggests also that the characters in the
story exhibit childish points of view toward the events that they
witness.