A public auto was arranged for December 20, 1694, but, so great was the popular revulsion of feeling against her, that it was not deemed safe to let her appear in the procession from the Inquisition to the church of San Domingo. She was secretly conveyed thither in a closed carriage two hours before day-break, and after the ceremonies she was not returned to the tribunal with the other penitents. She was kept until late in the afternoon and then, by a back door, was placed in the carriage with two persons of rank. In spite of these precautions some boys divined the truth and commenced stoning the carriage. Crowds gathered and a guard of soldiers was brought, but to little purpose, for the stones flew thicker and thicker; one of the occupants was seriously injured and it was as though by miracle that the carriage reached the Inquisition without being wrecked. Similar caution was observed in keeping her there for a month and conveying her to her place of reclusion. Meanwhile all over Lima boys were celebrating mock autos, carrying her effigies in procession and scourging and burning them.[692] It was probably the number and high station of her devotees that prevented a general prosecution, for only her three confessors, Ignacio Ixar, priest of San Marcelo, and the Augustinians, Fray José de Prado and Fray Agustin Roman, were arrested and tried.[693]
Among her revelations were some concerning an Indian tailor, Nicolás de Aillon known as Nicolás de Dios, who died November 7, 1677, with the reputation of a servant of God, and was represented as having been carried immediately to heaven by Christ, taking with him a crowd of souls from purgatory. His widow sought to establish his sanctity and the Jesuit, Bernardo Sartolo, wrote a book, published in Madrid in 1684, in which he accepted Angela’s story as true and praised without stint the tailor’s confessor, Fray Pedro de Avila Tamayo, who had been punished by the Inquisition as a scandalous corrupter of women in the confessional. When the book reached Lima it excited a lively discussion and was prohibited by the tribunal. The efforts to canonize Aillon, however, were not relinquished, for, in 1711, papal letters were received by the archbishop, ordering him to collect information as to the life and virtues of the candidate. What was done is not recorded, but we may assume that the response caused the affair to be dropped.[694]
The popular detestation excited by Angela Carranza seems to have served as a deterrent on impostures of the kind, for no other cases are on record until about 1720, when a quadroon named María Josepha de la Encarnacion was prosecuted for visions and revelations. She was not treated as leniently as Angela for, although she was perfectly harmless and had attempted no speculations on her devotees, and although, during her trial, she was so ill that she had to be transferred to a hospital, she was visited with the cruel punishment of two hundred lashes through the streets of Lima.[695] If subsequent cases occurred, their records have failed to reach us.
Mystic Illuminism and Quietism, which called for such energetic repression by the Spanish tribunals, seem to have had little currency in the more stagnant spiritual life of Peru. There is only one group of cases in the records, but these cast so much light on inquisitorial methods that they deserve treatment in some detail.
In November, 1709, there died at Santiago de Chile the Jesuit Padre Francisco de Ulloa, a man of little education but of high spiritual gifts, nourished on the mysticism of Tauler. He had devoted himself to the direction of consciences and had a circle of about thirty devotees, many of them nuns, who reverenced him as a saint. On his death-bed he committed his flock to another Jesuit, Padre Manuel de Ovalle, who found on assuming charge that, although they confessed freely, he could not penetrate into the spiritual recesses of their souls. Suspecting that there lay concealed the doctrines forbidden in Molinos, Madame Guyon and Fénelon, he pretended to be himself in search of the higher spiritual experiences; he drew up a series of propositions, among which were some of those condemned, and submitted it to a few of the leading spirits who accepted it, thus committing themselves to the dangerous doctrines of the absolute abandonment of the soul to God, the non-resistance to temptation, the idleness of exterior observances, and the impeccability of the confirmed adept. After six months spent in this pious treachery, and having secured written evidence of these heresies as entertained by José Solis and Pedro Ubau, he denounced them, June 14, 1710, to the tribunal of Lima, with all others whose names he had ascertained. He admitted that Solis and Ubau, Doña Petronilla Covarrúbias, José González, Doña Josefa Maturano and others, who were leaders among them, were persons of pure life, and that some whose careers had been evil, after practising the exercises prescribed by Ulloa, became virtuous and deeply religious, but this had no bearing on their heresy. At Concepcion there was another proselyte, Fray Felipe Chavarri, whose errors were shown by a letter which he enclosed. Still another leading spirit was Juan Francisco Velazco, an expelled Jesuit, who resisted Ovalle’s advances. Some extravagances on his part attracted public attention and finally became so marked that he was confined in the public prison.
Anything akin to Molinism was regarded as dangerous in the highest degree, but the Lima tribunal was so inert that it was not until December 10, 1712, that the Commissioner Manuel de Barona summoned Ovalle to confirm his denunciation. On this same December 10th, another Jesuit, Antonio María Fanelli, wrote to the tribunal enclosing some writings of Solis and reciting the obstructions placed in the way of his attempts to have the affair investigated at Santiago, where all were connected by intermarriages and friendships. The writings of Solis were submitted to a calificador, Maestro Dionisio Granado, who reported, December 22d, that they contained the heresies of Molinos, Luther and Calvin. After this there was a pause until February, 1714, when Commissioner Barona received further denunciations of Solis from the Jesuit Claudio Cruzat and the Mercenarian Nicolás Nolasco. These were soon followed by a deposition of Mariana González showing that Solis’s teachings were pure Illuminism of the Quietist school. She had been under Ulloa’s direction for two years before his death, and he taught the same doctrines. Altogether her testimony was of the most damaging character, and she added the names of eighteen of Ulloa’s disciples. Stirred by this Barona procured evidence from others of the group and sent the whole to the tribunal. On the strength of it the fiscal, August 27th, presented a clamosa against Solis as a follower of Molinos and demanded his arrest with sequestration. Ibañez, who was sole inquisitor at the time, on September 1st signed a decree for the prosecution of all the disciples of Ulloa, but on November 9th, in view of the importance of the case, he ordered a fresh calificacion and inquiries to be made as to the standing of Ovalle. Fray Antonio Urraca was sent as a special commissioner ad hoc to Santiago to verify the evidence and gather fresh testimony.
Urraca lost no time in proceeding to Santiago where he remained until 1718 employed on the work, and it was not until February 10, 1719, that he presented himself to the tribunal to report. Solis, Ubau and Velazco had already been received as prisoners in November, 1718. In sending them, Commissioner Barona stated that Solis, through poverty, had gone to the mines, where he had been arrested. Velazco had been crazy for two years and was found on a ranch with no property but a poor bed. Ubau had four thousand pesos in his possession; his arrest had caused great excitement, for he was accountant for nuns and frailes, for the cabildo of the city and for merchants, universally respected for uprightness and punctual in his religious duties.
Thus far, although dilatory in action, the proceedings of the tribunal had been unexceptionable. Molinism was an aberration that had excited too much abhorrence for any substantial accusation of it to be neglected. All reasonable effort had been made to obtain and to verify evidence; there seems to have been no desire to persecute the bulk of the disciples of Ulloa and attention was concentrated on three who were regarded as leaders and dogmatizers. After this, however, there is much to criticize in the prosecutions. Ubau, who was perfectly sane when incarcerated, began to manifest symptoms of mental alienation which developed into complete insanity. In February, 1733, he was transferred to the convent of the Recollects and finally to the insane department of the hospital of San Andrés. Velazco pleaded that he had been insane for nine years, with lucid intervals; his health speedily broke down, consumption set in and he was transferred, March 15, 1719, to the hospital of San Andrés where he died on the 19th and his body was returned to the tribunal to be thrust into the ground. Proceedings were continued against his memory and fame, the advocate of prisoners arguing that irresponsibility precluded his condemnation for formal heresy. As for Solis, the accusation against him consisted of eighty articles and assumed that he was wholly an apostate from the faith. He protested that he had persuaded himself that God had revealed to him the spiritual way; this had been his fault, for which he begged mercy and was ready to accept any penance that might be imposed. His advocate defended him by pointing out the deceitful way in which Ovalle had beguiled him into error, by submitting to him propositions of Molinos which he had admitted under examination that he did not understand. He had never even heard the name of Miguel de Molinos, so he could not be termed his disciple and, if he had erred, it had been in following his confessor Ulloa. As for Ulloa, the prosecution of his memory and fame was carried through its regular course. The accusation represented him as a dogmatizer of the heresies of Luther, Calvin, Molinos and Ubicler (Wickliffe). There were a hundred and sixty articles and twenty witnesses to prove them. When a defender was called for, by command of the Jesuit Provincial the procurador-general of the province of Chile presented himself and the most strenuous efforts were made to protect the honor of the Society. Padre Firmin de Irisarri, who conducted the defence, says that there was no proof that Ulloa had ever taught the worst of the propositions ascribed to him, and he throws the whole blame on the artifice of Ovalle betraying three unlettered laymen into accepting doctrines which they were led to believe were entertained by him to whom the dying Ulloa had entrusted them.
As far as the living were concerned, the cases were concluded and ready for sentence in 1725. Then ensued an inexplicable delay until 1736, when Calderon and Unda were in control of the tribunal. The last auto general celebrated in Peru was announced for December 23d and was solemnized in the public plaza, with exceptionally imposing ceremonies, in the presence of the viceroy, the Marquis of Villagarcía, and of all the magnates. The effigies of Ulloa and Velazco were brought forward, condemned and burnt; that of Solis was reconciled in view of his submission. The unfortunate Ubau, in spite of his insanity, had been condemned, December 1st, to be relaxed as an impenitent heretic who denied his guilt, and, as his mental condition would have precluded repentance, he would have been burnt alive, but for some reason he was not brought forward and was allowed to linger in the hospital until he died in 1747. The sentence, however, confiscated his property which, as we have seen (p. 353) amounted to more than sixty thousand pesos and disappeared without leaving a trace. It would scarce be doing injustice to Calderon and Unda to suggest that the taking up of these cases, after ten years’ interval, may have been to conceal the abstraction of the sequestration.[696]
When the Visitador Arenaza and the Inquisitor Amusquíbar, in 1746, arraigned their predecessors they laid special stress on the irregularities and excesses which characterized the conduct of these cases. In that of Ulloa, the consulta de fe voted in discordia; another consulta was called, from which the two consultors who had voted in favor of the accused were excluded; another Ordinary, who had as consultor condemned Ulloa’s papers, was substituted for the previous one, and two new consultors were summoned, who were only allowed a morning in which to examine the voluminous documents, and the consulta was held on a feast-day when Ibañez refused to act.