Fray Alonso Gasco, although self-denounced, was moderately tortured on intention. He was sentenced to appear in the auto, to abjure de vehementi, to six years’ reclusion in a monastery, he was deprived of celebrating for one year and perpetually of active and passive voice, teaching, preaching and confessing, and was to be sent to Spain to perform his penance. After the auto he was duly shipped by the fleet, April 20th, but on the voyage he talked about his case, which was forbidden by the Inquisition, and the tribunal asked the Suprema to prosecute him again. His place of reclusion was the convent of Jerez de la Frontera.
The Mercenarian, Fray Gaspar de la Huerta, was the profeta oculto of the revelations, and was mixed up in the affair; besides, he had administered sacraments without being in full orders and had managed communications in prison between the accomplices. He appeared in the auto, was degraded from his orders, received two hundred lashes and was sent to the galleys for life.
Then there was a poor man named Diego Vaca, who could neither read nor write, but who had some dreams which Cruz and Toro regarded as revelations. He was put on trial, but acknowledged his errors and the case was dropped. The Dominican Provincial, Fray Andres Velez, was brought into the affair because the prisoners had written to him and he had replied that efforts were making in Spain, with influence and money, to obtain relief from the tyranny of the inquisitors. Proceedings were commenced against him but he got wind of them and escaped to Spain early in 1575. The tribunal asked the Suprema to have him returned but he succeeded in averting this.
In all this affair some mysterious influence protected the Jesuits, who escaped prosecution with their accomplices. After the auto, however, Padre López was imprudent enough to say that Cruz had been insane, in spite of which the inquisitors had made a heretic of him and that he would not wish to have Cerezuela’s conscience. The tribunal thereupon referred to its records which proved him to have been the principal exorciser of María Pizarro and to have corrupted her. It further gathered testimony showing him to be an habitual solicitor in confession and among his papers was found a tract impugning the rightful possession of Peru by Philip II—a document so treasonable that the viceroy sent a copy of it to the king, for such action as he might deem fit, seeing that López was one of the most prominent and influential of the Jesuits. On his trial, López admitted the evidence as to solicitation and confessed to other cases, although he argued that they were not technically in actu confessionis. He was spared appearance in an auto. His sentence was privately read in presence of eight Jesuit confessors and then again in the Jesuit college in presence of all the Jesuits, where a discipline was administered lasting the space of two Misereres. It bore that he was to be sent to Spain by the first fleet, being strictly, during the interval, confined in the college, incomunicado. In Spain he was to be recluded for two years in the Jesuit house of Triguera, after which for four years he was to be confined in some designated place and ten leagues around it; he was deprived perpetually of confessing women and for two years of confessing men. He was duly forwarded in the next fleet.[682]
Doña Luisa Melgarejo was a bolder practitioner than María Pizarro. She had been the mistress of Dr. Juan de Soto, who had been compelled to marry her. For twelve years she carried on a profitable trade in ecstasies, revelations and other manifestations, and was largely consulted about marriages, undertaking voyages, obtaining positions and other similar matters, which brought in corresponding fees. Unbelievers compared her to the image of a saint and Dr. Soto to the basin under it for receiving offerings. When she was arrested, November 14, 1623, her writings, consisting of fifty-seven cuadernos, were seized in the hands of two Jesuits, Padres Contreras and Torres, and were found to be full of alterations and erasures by them to eliminate numerous heresies. Apparently the collusion of Jesuits indicated caution, and Inquisitor Gaitan, May 1, 1624, reported the matter to the Suprema and asked for instructions, with what result the records fail to inform us.[683] She did not appear in the auto of December 21, 1625, in which there figured four similar embusteras, who had traded on ecstasies and revelations. Three of these, María de Santo Domingo of Trujillo, Isabel de Ormaza and Isabel de Jesus of Lima, had given proof of exuberant imaginations in speculating upon the inexhaustible appetite for marvels.[684]
In the auto of March 16, 1693, there appeared Angela de Olivitos y Esquivel as an embustera hipocrita. She was a sempstress by trade and had not lived a moral life, as she had borne a child to one of her devotees. She was sentenced to reclusion for five years in a designated place and not to talk or write about revelations.[685] She was probably an humble imitator of the queen of impostors, Angela Carranza. This remarkable woman was born in Tucuman about 1638. In 1665 she came to Lima and commenced to have trances which she took care to be in public and mostly in the churches. In 1673 she began to write out her revelations, and learned men became her amanuenses till the product amounted to fifteen volumes of a thousand pages each, in a small and close handwriting. Her only qualifications were an exhaustless imagination and amazing audacity. In her youth her unchastity had been notorious and she confessed it in her trial; she was self-indulgent in eating and sleeping, foul and indecent in her talk and had no shame in exposing her person. Such was the impostor who for fifteen years, by mere dint of self-assertion, made herself feared and revered not only in Lima but throughout Peru. As Inquisitor Valera says, in his report of the case, “She, who was the common sewer of errors, was regarded as a paradise of perfections. In the mistaken apprehensions of men she was the saint of the age, the wonder of the world, the mistress of mysticism, the advocate of the people; so frequent were the accepted miracles, ecstasies, trances, intelligences and revelations that heaven was regarded as condensed in her.... Rosaries and beads were taken to her house not one by one but in whole chests and they passed to Spain and even to Rome with her renown.... In the common belief of the kingdom, naught was lacking to her but canonization and the altar. Fragments of what she had touched were cherished with the belief that they would soon become relics.... She deceived the human race in this kingdom—viceroys, archbishops, bishops and prelates.” She threatened and prophesied death to those who displeased her, and few there were who could resist the superstitious terror that came over them when she uttered her evil forecasts. Those who did not believe in her she maligned, and we are told that it greatly injured their prospects on account of her repute, not only among the vulgar but among the learned and wise, who regarded her words as oracles from heaven. The profound faith which she inspired is illustrated by the incident that when, after the earthquake of 1687, there was an inundation, and at night the report was spread that the sea was engulfing the land, there was a panic in which all who could fled to the mountains. A man in charge of the chest in which her writings were kept said to his assistant that there was no danger of the sea rising to the writings of the angel, even if it covered the whole earth, so the two mounted the chest and stood there until the terror passed.[686]
It argues a surprisingly low level of intelligence that men of the highest station in State and Church, of presumable culture in the learned professions, and of common-sense in the business walks of life, should have accepted without question the vulgar absurdities, poured forth in a constant stream, which reduced the awful mysteries of the spiritual world to the basest condition of common life, and represented the vituperative, coarse, grasping, self-indulgent woman, whom they saw leading an animal existence, as the one human being selected by God to be the repository of his powers over heaven, purgatory and hell, so that the Holy Ghost had told her that she was the daughter of the Father, the mother of the Son, the spouse of the Holy Ghost and the sagrario of the Trinity, and once, in presence of the Trinity, the Son made her take his seat for he wished her to form the Trinity with the Father and Holy Ghost. She threatened that she would wake up the pope and cardinals and knock them on the head to make them define the mystery of the Immaculate Conception. Once on entering the church of the Incarnation she met the Virgin, who offered her the breast; on sucking she complained that the milk was salt, and the Virgin replied that it had become so in waiting for her. Christ, with the Virgin, angels and saints, once entered her chamber; he asked for a chair and wanted to know whether he had to sit on the bench with the rest, after which the bench was greatly prized by her devotees as a relic. It would be endless to repeat all these absurdities which met with such devout credence and a single one of her stories will suffice. In a field of straw she saw Christ walking hand in hand with a young girl dressed as a beata. Filled with jealousy she set fire to the straw and left Christ burning, and when the angels remonstrated she said she was going to purgatory to release souls and then to hell to do the same. She went to purgatory and released many souls, but some would not go, among them her father, who said that his time would not come until she was dead, when she replied that he would have to wait, for she was still a young girl.[687]
She did a thriving business in many ways. She carried to heaven beads, rosaries, candles, bells, swords and rosemary, which were blessed on various saints’ days and possessed special virtues accordingly. They were brought to her for the purpose by the basketful and, on one occasion, Christ was vexed and said “This is a huckster business.” When she was condemned and they were brought in they filled a room in the Inquisition. Once she lent her shoes to the Virgin, whereupon Christ gave to her shoes the same virtue as that of the rosaries, which made a great demand for her old shoes. This kept her in foot-gear, for new shoes were constantly brought to exchange for her old ones. Her intervention was continually invoked in cases of sickness and difficulty, and her prophetic power was sought in marriages, voyages and enterprises of all kinds. These she sold at a round price and she had a cashier who kept an itemized account of her receipts—so much for a case of mumps, so much for fever, so much for the miracle of the ingots—and some of the entries were of one and two thousand pesos.[688]
After fifteen years of success, there would seem no reason why this career might not have continued until her death, to be followed with a demand for her canonization supported by ample store of miracles. Possibly there may be truth in the story that, on a rainy day in the calle del Rastro, she disputed the sidewalk with a Franciscan fraile, who rudely elbowed her into the mud. This caused such indignation that the offender expiated his clownishness with two months in the convent prison, when, to satisfy his rancor, he kept close watch on her and obtained proof that she was a sinner, whereupon he denounced her to the Inquisition.[689] If so, the denunciation came to one ready to act upon it in spite of the shock given to public opinion. Inquisitor Valera, whose resolute aggressiveness had rendered his career in Cartagena one of perpetual turbulence, had just been transferred to Lima, and doubtless eagerly seized the occasion to make an impression in his new post. Angela de Dios, as she called herself, was arrested December 21, 1688. The trial lasted for six years, owing doubtless to the immense mass of her writings to be examined, and her numerous heresies to be characterized and condemned, for she had ventured upon dangerous theological ground and had constructed a grotesque theogony to prove the Immaculate Conception. In her prolonged incarceration she professed to be still comforted by visits from Christ and the Virgin; she bore her confinement cheerfully, was eager for her three meals a day, and was generally found snoring when her cell was entered.[690]
Her system of defence was shrewd. She denied having given assent or belief to what was expressed in her writings; she had merely recited what she had seen and heard in her trances and submitted it to the learned men who were her confessors. Finally on June 2, 1694, she asked for an audience in which she said that, enlightened by God through this holy tribunal, she had been illuminated to detest the doctrines and propositions in her writings, which she now saw were heretical and blasphemous and defamatory. There had been, she said, no deception on her part as to her visions, and she had referred them to those whose virtue and religion enabled them to counsel her. Under their command she had reduced them to writing; she had wanted to burn the writings, but had been forbidden to do so and had never seen them after they left her hands. Now that the tribunal had condemned them she asked pardon of God and of his judges and ministers, for she saw that she had been deceived. Nothing more could be required and her sentence soon followed, which bore that she was to appear in a public auto, to abjure de vehementi, to be confined in a monastery for four years, to be deprived of pen and ink, and never to treat of revelations, together with sundry spiritual exercises and ten years’ exile from Lima and Tucuman, while a public edict ordered the surrender of all beads, rosaries, nail-parings and other objects treasured as relics.[691]