Its scope has already been considered, and also the offences that came within its pitiless jurisdiction at the time of Torquemada’s appointment to the mighty office of Grand Inquisitor and President of the Suprema. It remains to be added that in his endeavours to cast an ever-wider net he sought to increase the jurisdiction of the Inquisition beyond matters immediately concerned with the Faith and to include certain offences whose connection with it was only constructive.
Whether he succeeded to the full extent of his aims we do not know. But we do know that he contrived that bigamy should become the concern of the Holy Office, contending that it was primarily an offence against the laws of God and a defilement of the Sacrament of Marriage. Adultery, which is no less an offence against that sacrament, and which is not punishable by civil law, he passed over; but he contrived that sodomy should be brought for the first time within inquisitorial jurisdiction and that those convicted of it should be burnt alive.
Himself a man of the most rigid chastity, he must have been moved to anger by the unchastity so prevalent among the clergy. It was, however, beyond his power to deal with it without special authority from Rome, and he would have been bold indeed to have sought such authority at the hands of that flagrant paterfamilias Giovanni Battista Cibo, who occupied the Chair of St. Peter with the title of Pope Innocent VIII.
The most scandalous form of this unchastity was that known as “solicitation”—solicitatio ad turpia—or the abuse of the confessional for the purpose of seducing female penitents. It was a matter that greatly vexed the Church as a body, since it placed a terrible weapon in the hands of her enemies and detractors. It was admittedly rampant, and it is more than probable that it was directly responsible for the institution of the confessional-box—enforced in the sixteenth century—which effectively separated confessor from penitent, and left them to communicate through a grille.
The matter, like all other offences of the clergy, was entirely within the jurisdiction of the bishops, who would vigorously have resisted any attempts on the part of Torquemada to encroach further upon their province. So the Church was left to combat that evil as best she might; and, with the exception of an odd bishop who assumed a stern attitude and dealt with it as became his own dignity and the honour of the priesthood, the utmost lenience appears to have prevailed,[94] as we may judge by the penances imposed upon convicted offenders.
The perils and temptations to which a priest was exposed in the course of the intimate communications that must pass between him and his penitents were given full recognition and allowed full weight in the balance against the offence itself.
Later on, however, this matter which Torquemada had considered beyond his power was actually thrust within the jurisdiction of the Inquisition by a Church resolved, for the very sake of its existence, that the evil should cease.
Vexatious as this crime of “solicitation” had always been, it became most urgently and perilously so after the Reformation, when it provided those who denounced the confessional with an apparently unanswerable reason for their denunciations. It was wisely thought that the methods of the Holy Office were best calculated to deal with it, and the matter was relegated to the inquisitors. The defilement of the sacrament was the link that connected solicitation with heresy. Moreover, in some cases there might be heresy of a more positive kind; as when, for instance, the priest assured the penitent that her consent was not a sin. And the woman accusing a priest of solicitation before the Holy Office was always questioned closely upon this particular point.
In the later editions of the “Cartilla,” or Manual for the guidance of Inquisitors—all of which publications were issued by the private press of the Inquisition—are to be found under the heading “Causas de Solicitacion” instructions for the examination of a woman who denounces a priest upon these grounds.[95]
Even so, however, it could not be in the interests of the Church to parade these offenders, and thus expose the sore places in her own body.