Hay más de mamá que de papá en Dios Todopoderoso

“Hay más de mamá que de papá en Dios Todopoderoso” is the phrase Archbishop Spada recalls from Pope John Paul I’s first days in office: a compact, maternal image of God that exposes the divide between a gentler vision of the Church and the hard-line officials who opposed it. Spada’s recollection makes the phrase more than a remembered papal quip; it becomes evidence of how religious language can register a struggle over authority, mercy, and the methods used to preserve institutional power.

The remembered remark

Speaking to Lorenzo Quart, Spada recalls that Luciani had been pope for only thirty-three days. The press called him the smiling Pope, but Spada describes that smile as nervous, and recounts how the statement about God having more of a mother than a father provoked a hostile response from Cardinal Iwaszkiewicz and his colleagues on the hard-line wing. The phrase thus appears in a conversation about a short pontificate already viewed through the lens of factional conflict.

Spada presents the remark as characteristic of Luciani’s softness, which he regarded as ill-suited to the times. His recollection is not neutral: he speculates that the Holy Spirit had spared the Church from further harm by ending the pontificate early. The warmth of the phrase and the severity of Spada’s judgment sit uneasily together, exposing the political argument beneath his ostensibly affectionate anecdote.

A fault line in Church authority

The saying’s maternal image matters in the contrast Spada draws between Luciani and Iwaszkiewicz. The latter’s faction, as Spada describes it, favored restoring coercive instruments of control; Spada rejects that approach while insisting that authority can be exercised firmly without reviving torture. His recollection of the papal phrase therefore places an alternative religious temperament—one associated with tenderness—against a politics of discipline and intimidation.

The surrounding conversation connects that dispute to Quart’s assignment. After Iwaszkiewicz insists that the Church no longer burns anyone, the novel evokes less visible forms of persecution, and Spada’s director tells Quart to go to Seville, identify the author of a letter, and handle the matter discreetly through contact with local church authorities. The phrase helps establish the ideological atmosphere in which that mission is given: official restraint is professed, while the language of threat and institutional vulnerability remains close at hand.

Echoes in the Seville conflict

Later, Archbishop Corvo’s handling of the threatened demolition of Nuestra Señora de las Lágrimas shows another form of ecclesiastical authority at work. A 1687 privilege requires a Thursday Mass for Gaspar Bruner de Lebrija’s soul if the church is to retain its privileges; Corvo also seeks the suspension of Father Ferro, whose resistance to episcopal directives complicates the demolition process. These disputes are not the same as the Vatican factional struggle recalled by Spada, but they extend the novel’s concern with the friction between pastoral responsibility, institutional discipline, and the power to determine a church’s fate.

The phrase also resonates with the novel’s later discussion of faith as consolation. Father Ferro describes the fear and mortality he has witnessed and argues that the people who come to the church need the hope it offers, whether or not he himself can affirm belief. That account gives the remembered maternal image a broader thematic context: religious language can signify not only a doctrinal position, but also the promise of care for people living with suffering and uncertainty. The phrase remains a brief recollection, but it marks the humane possibility that hard-line authority cannot easily accommodate.