Thus forlorn and discredited passed away the tribunal which had in its prime cast terror over all the provinces between the two oceans, but the impression which it had produced did not disappear with it. In 1821 Don Celestino de la Torre reprinted a savage attack issued in Spain, under the title of “Memorial de la Santa Inquisicion,” which he says, in a prefatory note, is for the disillusionment of the serviles who sigh for the restoration of the Holy Office. It is still more significant that, in the agitation caused, in 1833, by the effort of the Government to reduce the Church to acquiescence in the new order of things, there appeared a little anonymous tract entitled “Mientras no haya Inquisicion se acaba la Religion”—“Without the Inquisition, Religion is destroyed”—arguing that heresy can never be suppressed without the use of force; excommunication, censures and argument are of no avail and the faith of Christ can only be preserved by arming the bishops with all the powers and methods of the Inquisition and enforcing their penal sentences by the State. The bishops, in fact, were quite ready to assume its functions as far as they could for, as late as 1850, on the appearance of a translation of Féréal’s Mystères de l’Inquisition, with notes by Don Manuel de Cuendias, a diocesan junta de censura was held which, without hearing the accused, passed a sentence of excommunication on the editor and on all who should read the book, all of which was publicly proclaimed by edict. This was based on a consulta presented to the junta by Doctor Sollano, who lamented the abolition of the Inquisition and proved satisfactorily that heresy merits the death-penalty.[554]
THE PHILIPPINES.
When Spain, in 1566, undertook the conquest of the Philippines, they were not erected into a separate government but were placed under the vice-royalty of New Spain or Mexico, with a governor or captain-general in command. When, in 1581, the bishopric of Manila was founded, it was suffragan to the archbishopric of Mexico and was not erected into a metropolitan see until 1595. The islands therefore were included in the district of the Mexican Inquisition, but they were too sparsely occupied by Europeans for the tribunal to think it necessary to establish an organization there. When, however, the first bishop, the Dominican Domingo de Salazar, reached his see in 1572, his zeal led him at once to establish an episcopal Inquisition with a fiscal and other officials, and the regular inquisitorial procedure; he soon found culprits and held a formal auto de fe, exercising his assumed authority with excessive severity. Don Francisco de Zuñiga, a youth of 20, in a discussion, had thoughtlessly declared fornication to be no sin; then on reflection he denounced himself, but notwithstanding this he was obliged to appear in an auto with a gag, and was banished for ten years, with a threat of two hundred lashes if he returned. Canon Francisco de Pareja, suspected of being one of the Alumbrados of Llerena, when arrested for solicitation, hanged himself in prison. Some of Salazar’s penitents on reaching Mexico complained to the tribunal and thus aroused its attention to this invasion of its jurisdiction, when it lost no time in vindicating its rights. March 1, 1583, it sent a commission as commissioner to the Augustinian Fray Francisco Manrique, a man of prominence in his Order, which was the most influential in the islands, and at the same time it notified Salazar that it had done so in consequence of his having assumed to act as inquisitor.[555]
Bishop Salazar, who was on the point of celebrating an auto de fe, was by no means disposed to abandon the authority which he had assumed. He refused to recognize the commission of Manrique and threatened with excommunication all who should do so. The Licenciado Juan Convergel Maldonado, who supported Manrique, was thrown into prison so harsh that he became insane, when Salazar sent him to Mexico, and Benito de Mendiola, who had served as Maldonado’s messenger, was likewise imprisoned. The traditional rivalry between the seculars and regulars and between the different Orders brought to the bishop ample support from the clergy, the Franciscans and the Jesuits—a high authority among the latter, Padre Alonso Sánchez, even declared that those who recognized the commissioner committed mortal sin. For six months Fray Manrique kept up the struggle and then abandoned it, writing to the tribunal, April 1, 1584, that, to avoid scandal he would do nothing more until it should have provided a competent remedy. The tribunal took prompt and effective steps. It wrote to Manila revoking all the acts of the bishop and to the Suprema, January 17, 1585, reciting the circumstances and pointing out the grave consequences that would follow when Salazar’s success should lead other bishops to follow his example. Through the Suprema it also addressed a letter to Philip II, who responded, May 26th, with a cédula to the bishop, telling him that he had invaded the jurisdiction of the Inquisition and ordering him to abstain from interfering in any way in affairs pertaining to it or with the duties of its commissioners. This was decisive but it was uncalled for. Salazar had already seen his error, had recognized Manrique and had handed over to him the papers in all the cases—seven in number—then pending before him. Thus the jurisdiction of the Mexican tribunal was permanently established over the islands, although subsequently there were one or two attempts made to organize an independent Inquisition there.[556]
In this the tribunal regarded rather its own ambition to extend its jurisdiction than the interests of the faith, for the whole career of the Philippine commissionership manifests the impossibility of conducting such a business at the distance of a hundred and forty degrees of longitude, when perhaps a year or two might pass without a vessel reaching Acapulco from Manila. The duties and powers of a commissioner were strictly limited and defined. As a rule he could do nothing except in execution of orders from the inquisitors; without such orders he could not make arrests, unless there was immediate danger of the escape of the accused; he could only gather information, report it and await instructions, and it was the same with regard to sequestration; if involved in a competencia he could issue inhibitions on the rival judges, but he could not put into execution the censures and penalties threatened in the formulas unless authorized by the tribunal.[557] In the detailed instructions sent to Manrique along with his commission there is little concession made to the difficulties of distance and communication by enlarging his powers. Although he is not allowed to sequestrate property, he is to inventory it and see that it is left in charge of a proper person, but this must be an arrangement between the accused and the depository in which the Inquisition assumes no responsibility. He is expressly told that he can make no arrests without orders, but an exception is made in the case of bigamy, on account of its frequency, when, if he obtains positive evidence against a culprit, he can arrest him and send him to Mexico, confining him in the royal gaol at the public expense, while awaiting a vessel. On the other hand, he is not to interfere with the secular or spiritual courts when they prosecute for bigamy and, if they offer to surrender an offender, he is to tell them to send him to Mexico, but not at the expense of the Inquisition.[558] Subsequently, in 1611, another exception was made, in the crime of solicitation in the confessional. The tribunal wrote to the Suprema that, in consequence of the number of denunciations, and in view of the need of the culprits’ presence in the Philippines, whither they had been sent at the royal expense, it had ordered that only two who seemed most guilty should be shipped to Mexico for trial and sentence. It further suggested that in future the commissioner should have power, in conjunction with a judge or other qualified person, to try the cases and send merely the papers to Mexico where the sentence should be rendered. To this the Suprema assented, adding that, in view of the distance and delay, the prisoner should meanwhile be discharged on bail—which indicates that in these cases the commissioner could arrest.[559] This does not seem to have been strictly carried out for, in 1613, we chance to hear of three culprits of this kind, sent from Manila to Mexico, with the papers, for sentence. One of these, Francisco Sánchez de Santa María, was accused by twenty-three native women, and another, Don Luis de Salinas, had been shipwrecked on the coast of Japan and the papers had been lost; he succeeded in getting back to Manila, where the commissioner tried him again and despatched him to Mexico.[560]
Another exception to the prohibition of arrest was made in the case of soldiers who deserted to the Dutch or to Moros and embraced their faith. What to do with these cases presented a problem concerning which the Mexican tribunal consulted the Suprema, as burning them in effigy might prevent their coming back. The Suprema thereupon submitted the matter to Philip III, representing that the soldiers were exposed to such privations that they were forced to fly and find refuge wherever they could, and meanwhile it advised the tribunal to await the action of the royal councils. To this the tribunal replied at much length, May 20, 1620, stating that no action had as yet been taken in such cases, but that the commissioner was ordered to proceed against the culprits and, on convicting them, to send them to Mexico for sentence. The whole discussion, however, was purely academical; there is no trace of such culprits being forwarded to the tribunal and this, possibly, for the very good reason that the military authorities punished the offence with death, when they could lay hands on the delinquents.[561] There was another class of cases in which the commissioners seem to have exercised the power of arrest. In 1666 we find the tribunal complaining to the Suprema that soldiers, to escape the rigor of military law, sought prosecution by the Inquisition in order to be arrested and sent to Mexico and to this end would blaspheme or utter heretical propositions. Many of them died on the passage and the expense of this bore heavily on the tribunal. For this the Suprema had no remedy to suggest except the plan adopted with soliciting confessors.[562] With these exceptions and the visitas de navios, or searching vessels for prohibited books, the duties of the commissioner were restricted to receiving denunciations, taking testimony, reporting to Mexico and executing such orders as he might receive from there. Still, they were personages of importance; although frailes living in their convent cells, they organized an imperfect kind of court; they had their assessors, notaries, treasurers, consultors and calificadores, their alguazil mayor and familiars and deputized their powers to sub-commissioners in the various parts of the islands.
Of real inquisitorial work for the purity of the faith we hear little. During the sixteenth century the only evidences of activity are three cases of Judaizers—Jorje and Domingo Rodríguez of Manila, reconciled in the Mexican auto of March 28, 1593, and Diego Hernández, regidor of Vitoria, accused by his cook of ordering her to cut chickens’ throats instead of strangling them; his property was sequestrated and evidence against him was sought in Oporto from whence he came, but he died during these prolonged preliminaries.[563] The seventeenth century is similarly barren, affording few instances except the occasional bigamists and soliciting confessors, military culprits and sometimes a few Dutch prisoners of war. In the Mexican auto of 1648 there appeared Alejo de Castro, an octogenarian sent from Manila on suspicion of Mahometanism, sentenced to perpetual exile from the Philippines and to servitude for life in a convent for instruction in the faith.[564] A more noteworthy culprit was Padre Francisco Manuel Fernández, S. J., a devotee of Luisa de los Reyes, a Tagal beata who had ecstasies. He declared that she had died many times and that God had resuscitated her so that she should suffer for the souls in purgatory; he compared her for sanctity to St. Teresa, St. Catherine and St. Inez and insisted that when he kissed her, embraced her and handled her indecently, he had no sensual feeling. It was a clear case of Illuminism against which the Inquisition waged unsparing war, nor was Fernández the only culprit, for another Jesuit, Padre Javier Riquelme was also compromised. Luisa was prosecuted in 1665 and testimony was taken against the Jesuits, but the Mexican tribunal reported, July 17, 1770, to the Suprema that the case had been suspended owing to the activity of the Jesuits in the islands, who always made the cause of their members their own. It complained bitterly of the way in which they impeded the Inquisition and frustrated its labors, when any Jesuit was concerned, whether for solicitation or other offence. They were not to be believed, for there was the case of the French Father Pierre Peleprat, whose detention was ordered, when they asserted that he was dead, but subsequently it was reported that this was not so but that he had been sent to France.[565]
The eighteenth century offers a similarly eventless record. So great was the inertness that the Edict of Faith, which was the chief source of denunciations and which should be published yearly in all parish churches, became virtually obsolete. From the time of Commissioner Paternina, who published it in 1669, forty-nine years elapsed before it was again published, in 1718, by Commissioner Juan de Arechederra; and Fray Juan de la Concepcion, writing in 1790, tells us that it had never been published since then.[566] It was a somewhat remarkable and uncalled-for burst of energy on the part of Commissioner Bernardo de Ustáriz, in 1752, when a score of Moro sailors of an English ship performed some pagan rites with songs and incense and he applied to the archbishop and then to the governor for aid to punish the scandal. Both declined, when he got General Antonio Romero, who was a familiar, to undertake an investigation. Then force was needed to arrest the culprits and a prison to confine them, and Romero sought the Marquis of Ovando, the governor for this, but Ovando replied that the matter was under his exclusive jurisdiction, an assertion which he repeated to Ustáriz, adding that he intended to punish the guilty. Ustáriz complained of this to the tribunal, which declared, February 19, 1754, that the governor had failed in his duty; that his assertion of cognizance of such cases should be expunged from any instrument in which it appeared, and that the commissioner and notary should notify him of this in person. The Suprema, however, took a cooler view of the matter, pointing out that, by the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713, English subjects could not be prosecuted for practising their religion in Spanish territory, but at the same time it approved of the action of the tribunal and promised to ask the king to make due provision for the future.[567] Seeing that baptism was necessary to give jurisdiction to the Inquisition and that natives, even when converted, were not subject to it, this sudden access of zeal on the part of Ustáriz would appear somewhat supererogatory.
Ustáriz also showed his energy, in 1750, by arresting Pierre Fallet, a Swiss of Neuchâtel and a convert from Calvinism. In 1742 Commissioner Arechederra had taken from him two indecent prints; in 1748 Commissioner Juan Alvárez had deprived him of another and denounced him to the Mexican tribunal as suspect of heresy. The tribunal, on March 14, 1748, ordered his arrest with sequestration, at the same time dismissing Alvárez for his indiscretions and replacing him with Ustáriz. The sequestration showed that Fallet’s property consisted of some uncollectable credits and many debts but, among his books on history, voyages and mathematics, in English, French, Flemish, Spanish, Latin and Greek, were found two prohibited ones—Rapin’s History of England and a “Historia publica y secreta de la corte de Madrid.” He was duly sent to Mexico, where he entered the secret prison, January 17, 1752, with broken health. An accusation of seventy-six articles was accumulated against him, but his sentence on August 8th consisted merely of abjuration for light suspicion, three months’ reclusion in the Jesuit College for instruction and some spiritual penances. This laborious trifling, so ruinous to the unfortunate subject, was crowned by the Suprema, which pondered over the case until March 7, 1772, when it ordered its suspension. Fallet, meanwhile, had been allowed to return to the Philippines, where his conduct was reported as exemplary.[568]