Some religious groups do this because they don’t want to assign a gender to God. They just say “God” or “God’s” every time and never use a pronoun.
In South Texas – don’t know if this is prevalent in other Spanish-speaking areas – comadre and compadre have a special meaning:
In Mexico, we say someone is our “comadre” (feminine) or “compadre” (male) when they are the godparents of our child (in baptism), …
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Same thing in Italian—the relationship is called comparatico (co-parenthood). To a child, their baptismal sponsors/godparents are madrina and padrino. (Madrina is also the lady who smashes the champagne bottle on a ship). To the child’s parents, the child’s sponsors are comare and compare. In Sicilian, cummari and cumpari. The relationship between you and your child’s sponsors is supposed to be every bit as close as blood relation, and is sacred to St. John the Baptist. This is why there are two different words for godfather. The Italian translation of Puzo’s novel The Godfather was Il Padrino, not Il Compare.
Also, cummari and cumpari are colloquialisms to address your close friends by, even if they didn’t literally sponsor your child. Even if you’re childfree.
Aren’t these also the origins of Italian-American slang terms “goomar” (mistress) and “goombah”?
Curiously, it’s exactly the same in my wife’s African language.
When she is speaking English she never has an issue with referring to an inaminate object as ‘it’ but does mix up ‘he’ and ‘she’ when talking about people.
Maybe maybe Neapolitan? Cf. “cumpà”, “cummà”. I heard something on this subject from an actual Italian, but do not remember all the details.
It must be Neapolitan, because it doesn’t match the Sicilian words. All of them, Spanish too, go back to Latin commater and compater.
The origin could be either the Italian, Sicilian or Neapolitan words being pronounced by someone who doesn’t actually speak any of those languages and doesn’t even hear the sounds correctly, forget about replicating them.
I think it’s likely Neapolitan, because (particularly around the province of Naples) there is a tendency for word-final vowels to drop (as in fagioli > fazool). Dictionaries seem to suggest cumpare and cummara, but Wiktionary, at least, seems to think there’s a cumpà (cumpà - Wiktionary).