The IOE requirement of impartiality and neutrality

The IOE requirement of impartiality and neutrality governs Lorenzo Quart’s mission to investigate the crisis around Nuestra Señora de las Lágrimas. Ostensibly a rule of restraint, it demands that he act only as an informant and avoid public scandal; its tension with the Church’s competing interests makes neutrality both a procedural instruction and a measure of institutional power.

The mandate from Rome

At the outset, Paolo Spada explains that the deaths connected with the church are real and that its troubles may become a scandal. Cardinal Jerzy Iwaszkiewicz favors involving the Holy Office “in the old style,” while Pope John Paul II wants a proper inquiry and considers such an intervention excessive. Quart is assigned the narrower task: gather information, preserve “exquisite neutrality,” and avoid publicity, whatever he discovers. The order makes a distinction between finding the truth and making it public; Iwaszkiewicz warns that publicly aired truth does not always set people free.

The instruction is reinforced by the ritual of obedience. Iwaszkiewicz extends his ringed hand, and Quart waits a moment before kneeling to kiss the ruby. The cardinal’s ensuing sign of the cross can be read as either blessing or threat. Neutrality is therefore not presented as a detached investigator’s chosen method alone: it is imposed from above, amid an unmistakable demonstration of authority.

Neutrality amid competing interests

In Seville, Archbishop Aquilino Corvo describes a proposed Banco Cartujano operation involving the church site. He says the archdiocese would receive generous compensation, a bank-funded church in one of Seville’s poorest neighborhoods, and a foundation supporting social work in the Roma community. Corvo presents these benefits as a persuasive settlement, while the church’s elderly parish priest remains an obstacle and the restoration and land dispute stay unresolved. The arrangement gives Quart’s inquiry stakes beyond the question of what happened at the church: the institution that expects him to remain impartial also has an interest in how the site’s future is decided.

Corvo’s language makes that conflict especially visible. He initially calls the prospective beneficiary “my diocese,” then corrects himself to “this diocese,” as if checking his claim to speak for the institution. Quart answers that the proposal is convincing but does not endorse it. His reserved response keeps him within the informational role even as he hears the archbishop’s case for a transaction that would turn church property into a redevelopment bargain.

A counterclaim from within the Church

Father Óscar gives the dispute a different meaning. He says the church must defend itself from the institutional Church, which, in his account, has repeatedly lost its connection with the people it claims to serve: first Europe after the Reformation, then workers who saw it aligned with their oppressors, and now young people and women. He imagines empty churches left to mice. His accusation is not merely that the hierarchy has made a bad decision about one parish; he sees institutional submission and silence as a betrayal of the Church’s original message.

Father Óscar also describes clerical advancement as a system of ambition and compromise, in which priests cultivate useful professors, friends, and bishops. Against this background, Quart’s mandated neutrality cannot be a view from nowhere. The order arrives from an institution whose own representatives disagree about the church’s fate, while Father Óscar identifies silence and obedience as part of the problem. The novel places the rule between an administrative demand for restraint and a local claim that restraint protects the wrong interests.

The rule turned into an accusation

By the investigation’s conclusion, the question is no longer only whether Quart observed the mandate but how strictly it should be interpreted. He recalls that, to him, the Mass he celebrated at Nuestra Señora de las Lágrimas mattered, even though it was “a symbol, nothing more.” He says that such gestures can nevertheless matter at particular moments. Spada acknowledges that Quart’s final appeal—including his image of a piece of sky disappearing and the patched skin of a drum—helped persuade church authorities to preserve the building and appoint a new parish priest. The Nunciature in Madrid and the Archbishopric of Seville have received instructions to that effect.

That result is described as a success, but it also establishes that Quart’s conduct exceeded the strictly informational posture assigned to him. Iwaszkiewicz cites the Archbishop of Seville’s report to conclude that Quart overstepped his authority, and credits Corvo’s insinuations about Quart’s personal conduct. Spada admits that the two men have made Quart’s position difficult, while noting that he himself is less vulnerable because he has dossiers and the relatively secure support of the Secretary of State. The rule thus proves double-edged: it defines Quart’s mission in advance, helps constrain his intervention, and later supplies the standard by which his effort to preserve the church can be condemned.