BANNER OF THE INQUISITION.
From Limborch’s “Historia Inquisitionis.”
Amongst those who joined him in the plot was a man named Juan Franco, of a family of carriers of La Guardia. This man went with Benito to Toledo on the Feast of the Assumption, intent upon finding a child for their purpose. They drove there in a cart, which they left outside the city while they went separately about their quest.
Franco found what he sought in one of the doorways of the Cathedral, known as the Puerta del Perdon—the door, adds Moreno, through which the Virgin entered the church when she came from heaven to honour with the chasuble her votary St. Ildefonso. The Jew beheld in this doorway a very beautiful child of three or four years of age, the son of Alonso de Pasamontes. His mother was near at hand, but she was conveniently blind—i.e. conveniently for the development of Moreno’s story, this blindness serving not only the purpose of rendering the child’s undetected abduction easily possible, but also that of affording the martyred infant scope for the first miraculous manifestation of his sanctity.
Juan Franco lured the boy away with the offer of sweetmeats. He regained his cart with his victim, concealed the latter therein, and so returned to La Guardia. There he kept the child closely and safely until Passion Week of the following year, or, rather, until the season of the Passover, when the eleven Jews—six of whom had received Christian baptism—assembled in La Guardia. They took the child by night to a cave in the hills above the river, and there they compelled him to play the protagonist part in a detailed parody of the Passion, scourging him, crowning him with thorns, and finally nailing him to a cross.
On the subject of the scourging, Moreno tells us that the Jews carefully counted the number of lashes, aiming in this, as in all other details, at the greatest historical fidelity. But when the child had borne without murmuring upwards of five thousand strokes, he suddenly began to cry. One of the Jews—finding, we are to suppose, that this weeping required explanation—asked him: “Boy, why are you crying?”
To this the boy replied that he was crying because he had received five lashes more than his Divine Master.
“So that,” says this doctor of divinity quite soberly, “if the lashes received by Christ numbered 5,495, as computed by Lodulfo Cartujano in his ‘In Vita Christi,’ those received by the Holy Child Christoval were 5,500.”[162]
He mentions here the child’s name as “Christoval,” to which he informs us that it was changed from “Juan,” to the end that the former might more aptly express the manner of his death. There is no doubt that some such consideration weighed when the child was given that suggestive name; but the real reason for it was that no name was known (for the identity of the boy did not transpire), and it was necessary to supply him with one by which he might be worshipped.
When he was crucified, his side was opened by one of the Jews, who began to rummage[163] for the child’s heart. He failed to find it, and he was suddenly checked by the child’s question—“What do you seek, Jew? If you seek my heart, you are in error to seek it on that side; seek on the other, and you will find it.”
In the very moment of his death, Moreno tells us, the Santo Niño performed his first miracle. His mother, who had been blind from birth, received the gift of sight in the instant that her child expired.[164]