Chapter 31
Section 31 of A History of the Inquisition of Spain, Volume 4. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. A History of the Inquisition of Spain, Volume 4, by Henry Charles Lee. Book VIII. Spheres of Action. Propositions. Chapter 7, Part 7. Another contemporaneous case is worthy of mention, if only because
the Geronimite Joseph de Sequenza has customarily been included among the victims of the Inquisition, in place of which he sought its jurisdiction in order to protect himself against the machinations of his brethren. At an early age he had entered the order, where his talents and varied learning gained him rapid advancement. When the escorial was completed, Philip II sent for him to preach the first sermon in the church of San Lorenzo. Since then he had
preached oftener than anyone else, and many of the gentlemen and ladies of the court had selected him as their confessor. Philip placed him in charge of the royal archives and of the sagrarios and reliquaries of the two libraries, which brought him into frequent communication with the king, and he had utilized this to cause appointments and dismissals, and to institute reforms in the College of Parazes. This caused jealousy and enmity, and Diego de Iepes, the prior of his
convent of San Lorenzo, endeavored to procure his removal. Then he incurred the hostility of the prior of the college, Cristobal de Zafra, who was a florid preacher. In a sermon before the king on the previous nativity of the virgin, September 8th, he had said that the minotaur was Christ, and the labyrinth was the gospel, and Ariadne was our lady and the child she bore. To Theseus was faith, and if anyone desired to enter the labyrinth, he must pray to the virgin
for her child. Such sermons were the fashion, and Diego de Iepas eclipsed this on January the 1st, when he told his audience that when Delilah had exhausted Samson, she removed him from her and delivered him to the Philistines. So when the virgin had exhausted God, she removed him and placed him in the manger with other equally filthy topics. Pray, Joseph sought to repress this style of preaching, insisting that it should be confined to expositions of the evangel and
moral instruction which gained him enemies among those whose eccentricities and bad taste he reproved. Another source of enmity was that he was entrusted with the selection of students to attend the lectures on Hebrew of Arius Montano when he came to San Lorenzo, which angered those who were omitted. A formidable cabal was formed for his ruin, careful watch was kept on his utterances in unguarded moments and in the pulpit, and it was not difficult to collect
propositions which, when exaggerated or distorted, might furnish material for prosecution. It was safer to trust to a prejudiced court within the order than to the Inquisition. A visitation of the convent and college was ordered with instructions to withdraw the license of any preacher or confessor found to be insufficient. The visitors came on April 13, 1592, and reported on the 17th. The frails were examined separately and secretly, and of 22, all but one offered objections to opinions uttered by Fray Joseph.
From their testimony was extracted a series of 19 propositions, most of them utterly trivial. He was accused of decrying scholastic theology, of holding that preaching should be based on the bare scriptures, of exaggerated praise of Arius Montano at the expense of other expounders of holy writ, of advising a frail to study scripture in place of books of devotion, and much else of the same nature. The Frails had learned the processes of the Inquisition. They submitted
these propositions for qualification to Guterres Montilla, the chief professor of theology in the college, who rendered three opinions varying in tone, but the final one declared that some of the propositions inclined to Lutheranism and Wyclifitism and others to Judaism. Moreover, on May 18th, he wrote to the king announcing the discovery of a dangerous heresy in the College of San Lorenzo, which, if not checked at the outset, might bring upon Spain the dangers developed in
other lands. It had spread among the students, some of whom, by the vigilance of the prior, were already in the Inquisition of Toledo, and he begged Philip to urge on the prior unrelaxing efforts to avert the evil. All this had been done in secret, but enough reached the ears of Fray Joseph to convince him of the ruin impending at the hands of his brethren. Such matters belonged exclusively to the jurisdiction of the Inquisition, and they could not prevent
his appealing to that tribunal in which he lost no time. On April 23rd, he presented himself at Toledo with a letter from his prior, Diego de Yepes, stating that he was learned, able, and a prior of the order, but that some of his expressions in preaching and conversation had created scandal, in consequence of which he had been tried by visitors. This trial Yepes was ready to submit to the tribunal, and he asked that Fray Joseph be treated with its customary
benignity. With this Fray Joseph handed in a written statement containing what he had been able to gather as to the accusations, and submitting himself to the judgment of the inquisition, both in correcting what was wrong and in accepting whatever punishment might be imposed. The tribunal sent for the papers of the trial and assigned to him the convent of La Cisla as a prison, which he was not to leave without permission under the customary penalties.
This confinement, however, was scarce more than nominal, for on May 14th he represented that the king and court were at San Lorenzo, and his absence would be a great dishonor to him, wherefore he asked to have, by return of his messenger, permission to go there, which was immediately granted. Subsequently, he was allowed the unusual favor of consulting with his counsel at the latter's house, and on October 21st, he asked license to return to San Lorenzo for a month
because he was suffering from fever, and his physician stated that his life was at risk at La Cisla, a request which was doubtless granted. The contrast is marked between his treatment and that of Luis de Leon. Meanwhile, the trial was in progress with all customary formalities. The propositions were submitted to calificadores, and on July 30, the fiscal presented the accusation, denouncing him as an apostate, heretic, and excommunicated perjurer, demanding his relaxation
and asking that he be tortured as often as necessary. He duly went through the examinations on the accusation and publication of evidence, and presented eight witnesses who testified to his distinguished reputation for learning, piety, and orthodoxy, also that Frey Cristobal de Zafra was noted for bringing fables and poetry into his sermons, and that Fray Justo de Soto, who had accused him of saying that Jews and Turks could be saved, was an ignoramus,
knowing little of grammar and nothing of theology. It was not until October 22nd that was held the Consulta de Fe, which voted unanimously for acquittal. The Suprema confirmed the sentence on January 25, 1593, when Fray Joseph was probably absent, for it was nearly a month before he appeared on February 19th to hear it read. At his request, a copy of it was given to him, and thus ended a case in which the Inquisition was the protector of innocence against fraternal
malignity. The extent to which Spanish intellect wasted itself in interminable controversies over the infinitely little, and the dangers to which all men were exposed to exercise the slightest originality are illustrated in the case of Padre Alonso Romero, S.J., lector of theology in the Jesuit College of Valladolid. For a proposition concerning the intricate question whether a man violates the law of fasting by eating nothing on a fast day, his fellow Jesuit Fernando de la Bastida,
with a number of students, denounced him to the Inquisition August 29, 1614. The main proposition, and a number of others on which it was based, or which were deduced from it, were pronounced by the calificadores, or at least by some of them, to be false, scandalous, rash, and approximating to error. No less than seventeen witnesses were examined against him, and when on January 9, 1615, he presented himself, he admitted uttering the proposition, but said that he had consulted many learned men and the principal universities, and he offered in defense the signatures of many
Jesuits and of professors of Salamanca, Alcala, and Valladolid, to the effect that it was not subject to theological censure. The case proceeded to a vote in Discordia, October 15, when the Suprema ordered his confinement in a Jesuit house, that he should cease lecturing, and that the papers in his cell should be examined. On October 29th, while he was detained in the audience chamber, his keys were taken and his papers were seized, although during this audience he stated that,
when he found that many learned men condemned his proposition, he had retracted it publicly and had defended the opposite, which he offered to do again. To the ordinary mind this would appear to render further proceedings superfluous, but the assumed injury inflicted on the faith demanded reparation, and the case went on. Thirty-three propositions dependent on the first one were submitted to calificadores and condemned as before, while nineteen others
extracted from his papers were explained by him and dropped. Drearily and slowly the proceedings dragged along. On March 3, 1616, the accusation was presented, but it was not until June 6, 1619 that the publication of evidence was reached. Yet the case seems still to have been in the preliminary stage, for on July 10th the Suprema ordered that the propositions, which had now grown to 57 in number, should be submitted to Calificadores, and on their report the tribunal
should decide whether to transfer him to the secret prison. It waited more than six months before it reached a decision, February 5, 1620, to make no change, but when the Suprema learned this, he ordered him to the prison of familiars, which was done on August 12th. Then on the 18th, he selected patrones to advise him, and on September 25th, he presented the interrogatories for the witnesses in defense. On May 12th, 1621, he was informed that all that he had required had
been done for him. On July 5th, the consultant de Fay voted that he should be warned and required to retract the proposition respecting fasting and those derived from it, which he had already done spontaneously six years before. As for the others, he was acquitted. The Suprema took nearly a year to consider this and did not confirm it until June 2, 1622, when the trial ended with the reading of the sentence on June 30. All this reads like a travesty and might well be the subject of ridicule
were it not for the serious import on a nation's destiny of a system under which eight years of a man's life could be consumed on a matter which the outcome showed to be so frivolous to say nothing of the indefinite number of calificadores and officials whose energies were wasted on this solemn trifling. End of section 31
