The authors of the Golden Age embodied phrases that today, more than three centuries later, have become popular expressions. As an example, these buttons: “powerful gentleman is a gift of money”, by Quevedo; “Life is a dream”, by Calderón” and “with the Church we have run into”, by Cervantes. This last expression, however, requires a qualification, since in reality El manco de Lepanto never wrote that quote in Don Quixote, least not as we know it.
The locution “with the Church we have come across” is used to express that an impediment or problem promoted by the ecclesiastical government has arisen, although it is also commonly used to point out an inconvenience created by any type of authority. Thus, both “the priest didn’t let us in; we ran into the Church” and “my mother won’t let me out tonight; we ran into the Church” are phrases in which the expression has been used correctly.
The phrase is sometimes accompanied by the name of Don Quixote’s squire, “we have run into the Church, Sancho”, but the truth is that this quote does not appear in the universal work of Cervantes.
How is it explained that this famous expression is attributed to Cervantes if he never wrote it? The answer is in chapter IX of the second part of the novel, when Don Quixote and Sancho arrive at El Toboso. Looking for the fortress where Dulcinea is supposedly located, the hidalgo arrives in front of a church and says: “We have found the church, Sancho.” That is, Cervantes simply wrote that the characters arrived at the temple, and that is why the word church appears in lower case. And he never used the verb bump in the sentence.
In this way, the figurative meaning of the expression came after the publication of the second part of Don Quixote, changing the “dado” for the “topado” and giving it a negative meaning towards the ecclesiastical estate, which forces us to write Church with the initial capital letter.
Thus, “we’ve run into the church” is part of the group of famous phrases that were never actually said, such as Humphrey Bogart’s “Play it again, Sam” in the movie Casablanca; that of “I can’t feel my legs” by Sylvester Stallone in Rambo; the “Elementary dear Watson” that Sherlock Holmes never uttered or the “More wood” of Groucho in The Marx Brothers in the West.