The king did not send the opinions of the prelates to Rome, but wrote to the Pope, and told him that he was informed that the archbishops of Santiago and Grenada had many important things to reveal concerning Carranza, and that he hoped his holiness would command all that was necessary to be done on this occasion.
On the 7th of August in the same year, Gregory XIII. expedited a brief, in which he commissioned Don Gaspar de Quiroga, inquisitor-general, to receive the declarations of the prelates in the presence of a notary, and of witnesses, and to send them signed and sealed to Rome. A similar brief was sent on the 17th of October, to the Bishop of Jaen, the magistral canon of Toledo, and Professor Mancio. The inquisitor-general appointed commissioners, to whom he gave written instructions. They were directed to exact an oath to speak the truth and observe secrecy, to induce the prelates to declare that the change in their opinion was founded on a more strict examination of the work, and a knowledge of the other writings of the author; lastly, to make them state in a separate paper what they now thought of the works and faith of Carranza, and not to allow them to say that they did so in obedience to the king, as they had stated at first, but to declare that they acted according to the brief.
These declarations were sent to Rome in December. Don Francis Blanco, who had only censured sixty-eight propositions of the Catechism on the first examination, now censured two hundred and seventy-three in the Catechism and pamphlets together, sixty-three of which he pronounced to be heretical.
This extraordinary change was attributed by the prelates to a love of justice, to conscience, zeal for religion, and a wish to please God.
The declarations of five new witnesses of so much consequence, entirely changed the appearance of the trial. Gregory XIII. fell into the snare, which it was indeed difficult to avoid, since the intrigue which produced it was conducted by so powerful a sovereign as Philip, and so formidable and able a body as the Spanish Inquisition. Gregory had discovered the intrigues when at Madrid, and informed St. Pius V. that it would be impossible even for foreign judges to terminate the trial in an equitable manner in Spain; but he was far from supposing that the animosity of Carranza's enemies would be still more active at Rome.
The Pope loved justice, and thought he was obeying its dictates, in commanding, on the 14th of April, 1576, that the Archbishop of Toledo should abjure all heresies in general, and particularly the sixteen Lutheran propositions which he was violently suspected of believing. He was suspended for five years from performing his archiepiscopal duties, and condemned to be confined during that time in the dominican convent of Orvietta in Tuscany, and for the present in that of the Minerva at Rome, where some penances were also imposed, one of which was to visit in one day the seven churches of St. Peter, St. Paul, St. John de Lateran, Santa Croce of Jerusalem, St. Sebastian, St. Mary Major, and St. Laurence. The prohibition of the Catechism by the holy office was maintained.
The sixteen Lutheran propositions abjured by Carranza were the following:—
1. Works performed without the spirit, of whatever nature, are sins, and offend God.
2. Faith is the first and principal means of obtaining justification.
3. Man is formally justified by the justice of Jesus Christ; by that, Christ has merited for us.