A History of the Inquisition of Spain; vol. 4

by Henry Charles Lea

This virtuous rigor, however, was purely exceptional. The usual tolerant view adopted is manifested in a case which, in 1535 at Toledo, came before the vicar-general, Blas Ortiz, a man so respected that he was promoted to the inquisitorship of Valencia soon afterwards. Alonso de Valdelamar, parish priest of Almodovar, was charged with a black catalogue of offences—theft, blasphemy, cheating with Cruzada indulgences, charging penitents for absolution, frequenting public brothels and solicitation. It was in evidence that he refused absolution to a girl unless she would surrender herself to him, that he seduced a married penitent whose husband was obliged to leave Almodovar in order to get her away from him, while Doña Leonor de Godoy admitted that he repeatedly used violence on her in the church itself. His sentence, rendered February 26, 1535, stated that the fiscal had fully proved his charges, but for all these crimes he was punished only with thirty days’ penitential reclusion in his church, with a fine of ten ducats, besides four reales to the fiscal, a ducat to the episcopal advocate, ten days’ wages to the notary who went to Almodovar to take testimony, and the costs of the trial. From this the fiscal appealed to the archbishop but the next day withdrew the appeal; Valdelamar accepted it and was sent back to his parish to pursue his course of profligacy. Evidently the episcopal tribunal was more concerned with the profits of its jurisdiction than with the suppression of solicitation.[181]

SUBJECTED TO THE INQUISITION

It may be inferred from this that peccant confessors were not likely to be prosecuted, unless there were other circumstances or offences to stimulate action, and this is confirmed by another case, about the same time, which also shows the readiness of the tribunal to claim jurisdiction. Pedro Bermúdez, incumbent of Ciempozuelos, employed a priest named Pareja as vicar, from 1525 to 1529. They quarrelled; Pareja was dismissed, found employment at Valdemoro, and commenced suit against Bermúdez. The latter retorted by instigating a certain Catalina Roldan, who had borne a child to Pareja, and her mother, to complain to Romero, a visiting inquisitor from Toledo, about the seduction, asking that he be forced to provide a dower and find a husband for her. Romero took up the case. Bermúdez busied himself in collecting testimony and was aided by a priest named Solorzano, whose enmity had been excited by Pareja having served as commissioner in taking evidence as to his seduction of a married woman, for which he was prosecuted in Alcalá. The proof collected against Pareja was conclusive. Two of his penitents admitted to having yielded to him, and several others testified as to his advances in the act of confession. When one of them was asked whether she confessed to him their mutual sin, she said that he told her not to do so, and afterwards admitted her to communion. There was also evidence as to his violating the seal of confession, and to irreverence in administering the sacrament. The trial pursued the usual course, the main charges being his misdeeds with his female penitents, which he admitted more or less explicitly. When the papers were sent to the Suprema, it returned them, saying that the charges for the most part were beyond the competence of the tribunal, and appertained to the episcopal court, to which they should be transferred, while the tribunal could proceed with the little that remained. The charges thus, after omitting the solicitation, were reduced to four—that he persuaded his accomplices that their mutual sin need not be confessed, that he told them that they could take the sacrament without confessing, that he said it was better to have masses celebrated than to pay debts, and that almost all the witnesses held him to be a bad Christian, a heretic and an evil man.

Pareja and his advocate argued that the case was outside of inquisitorial jurisdiction, but the tribunal pushed it to the end on these subsidiary points and, on May 23, 1532 sentenced him to perpetual deprivation of hearing the confessions of women, to a fine of twenty thousand maravedís, and to have Toledo as a prison for two years, during which he was to fast and recite psalms on Fridays. As he was not required to abjure, even for light suspicion, the charge of heresy was abandoned, and as solicitation was not included in the sentence, he was liable to further prosecution by the Ordinary. Yet the character of the penalties shows that solicitation was the real gravamen, over which the tribunal was seeking indirectly to acquire jurisdiction.[182]

Evidently, if there was to be any cure or mitigation of this corroding cancer, some less sympathetic tribunal than the episcopal court was requisite, and the Inquisition was eager to supply the want, yet matters were allowed to drift for a quarter of a century longer. Possibly it may have been the Lutheran alarm of 1558 that led Archbishop Guerrero of Granada to seek the remedy and to call to the attention of the Holy See the frequency of the crime and the need of its more energetic repression.[183] His appeal was heard, and Paul IV, in a brief of February 18, 1559, expressed his sorrow at learning that certain priests of Granada misled their penitents and abused the sacraments, wherefore he granted, to the inquisitors of Granada, jurisdiction over the heresy implied in the crime and withdrew all exemptions of the religious Orders.[184] What activity the Granada tribunal manifested in the exercise of its new function is not recorded, but the field thus thrown open was sufficiently inviting for Valdés, in 1561, to obtain from Pius IV a brief granting to him and to his delegates throughout Spain the same faculties.[185] It required some ingenuity to bring the crime within the purview of the Inquisition, but it was alleged that no one whose faith was correct could thus abuse the sacraments of the Church of God. The point is not without importance, for it made the matter one of faith and not of morals, leading, as we shall see, to a notable limitation in the efficacy of the reform attempted.

The regular clergy sought to escape to the milder mercies of their own superiors, and claimed that, in the constitution of Pius IV, in 1562, which subjected them in general to the Inquisition, there was an exception of cases in which the superiors had taken the earlier action.[186] The application, however, of this exception to the crime of solicitation was negatived, in 1592, by a decree of Clement VIII, which declared that the jurisdiction of the Inquisition in this matter was exclusive and not cumulative, and it ordered the members of all privileged Orders to denounce to the Inquisition their guilty brethren.[187] In 1608, Paul V granted the same powers to the Inquisition of Portugal and, in 1612, he settled in favor of the faith a question which had arisen, whether the briefs comprehended the solicitation of men as well as of women.[188] Even before this, solicitation in Italy had been subjected to the Roman Inquisition, for it issued, December 15, 1613 a decree ordering confessors to instruct their penitents that they must denounce to the tribunals all attempts to solicit them to evil and, on July 5, 1614, it included, what it described as a frequent offence, the discussion of indecent matters with women in the confessional, even without confession.[189]

LEGISLATION OF GREGORY XV

Thus the Church was gradually realizing the necessity of more stringent measures to curb the evil propensities of those to whom it confided the salvation of souls, but as yet it had made only local regulations. Gregory XV recognized that a general law was required, to cover all the lands of the Roman obedience, and not merely those possessed of an Inquisition and, at the same time, to define more comprehensively the nature of the offence. The briefs thus far had limited this to seduction in the act of hearing confessions. Papal legislation was always construed in the strictest manner, and confessors felt safe if they confined their seductions to the time preceding and following the actual utterance of the confession. Had the moral and spiritual welfare of priest and penitent been the only matter involved, it would have been easy to include in general terms any indecent or illicit passages between them, no matter when or where committed, but solicitation had been made to involve suspicion of heresy, in order to bring it under the Inquisition, and it became regarded as a purely technical offence, punishable only when it could be connected directly with the sacrament, leading to the unfortunate corollary that otherwise it was a trivial matter, undeserving of special consideration.

Accordingly Gregory, in his brief Universi Dominici Gregis, August 30, 1622, while enlarging the definition, confined it to what was said or done in the place destined to hearing confessions, whether it was before or after confession, or even if there was only a pretext of confession. He extended the provisions of his predecessors to all lands, and delegated all inquisitors and Ordinaries as special judges, with exclusive jurisdiction to inquire into and diligently prosecute such cases, according to the canons in matters of faith. He further decreed the penalties of suspension of functions, deprivation of benefices and dignities with perpetual disability for the same and, for regulars, of active and passive voice; besides these there were the temporal penalties of exile, galleys, perpetual and irremissible imprisonment and, in cases of exceptional wickedness, of degradation and relaxation. In view of the difficulty of proof, single witnesses should suffice for condemnation, when circumstances afforded due presumption. Confessors, who found that their penitents had been previously solicited, were required to admonish them to denounce the offenders, and for neglect of this they were to be duly punished. This latter provision was of difficult enforcement, for Urban VIII, in 1626, felt obliged to address all archbishops, instructing them to call the attention of confessors to it, and to insert a corresponding clause in all licences. The regular clergy seem to have been the subject of special anxiety for, in 1633, the superiors of all religious houses were ordered to assemble the inmates yearly and warn them as to the observance of these decrees, and this was also to be done in all chapters, general, provincial and conventual.[190]

The Holy See was in earnest, but the result did not correspond to its efforts. France and Germany paid virtually no attention to the decrees, and in Spain the Inquisition made no change in its procedure or in the mildness of its penalties. The only effect of Gregory’s brief was to raise the question whether it did not confirm, at least cumulatively, to the bishops the jurisdiction of which they had been practically deprived. No distinction was expressed between lands with and those without an Inquisition, and the original briefs of Paul IV and Pius IV had not deprived the bishops of jurisdiction, although the latter had made little effort to assert it against the exclusive claims of the tribunals. We chance to hear of the case of Dr. Miguel Bueso, who was surrendered by the Archbishop of Valencia, in 1608, for trial on this charge and, after punishment, was returned to the archiepiscopal court.[191] Soon after this de Sousa argues that, in spite of the papal decrees, bishops have cumulative jurisdiction, although the inquisitor-general can evoke cases.[192] In 1620, Inquisitor-general Luis de Aliaga had a struggle with his brother Isidor de Aliaga, Archbishop of Valencia, over the case of Gaspar Flori, rector of Urgel, who was on trial by the vicar-general for various offences, including solicitation. The tribunal demanded cognizance of this special charge; the vicar-general asserted cumulative jurisdiction, adding that he had already tried two cases of the kind. The inquisitor-general argued strenuously that, as a matter of faith, it belonged to the Inquisition; if it were not a matter of faith it would go unpunished, for there would be no obligation to denounce, and without this women would never imperil their honor, for experience showed how rarely they did so voluntarily, and they had to be compelled by the refusal of absolution. Notwithstanding all this the archbishop of Valencia held good; his vicar-general tried the case and executed the sentence.[193] There were few episcopal courts, however, so audacious as this, and the claim of the Inquisition to exclusive jurisdiction was generally conceded.