Chapter 62
CHAPTER XVI. PART II. SPHERES OF ACTION. MISCELLANEOUS BUSINESS. PERSONATION OF PRIESTHOOD.
The veneration with which the sacraments are regarded, and the supreme importance ascribed to them as a means of salvation, render it indispensable that they should be guarded with the utmost solicitude. Not only is their validity essential to those who seek them, but any fraud in their dispensation is sacrilege, which, in the case of the Mass, may plunge all worshippers present into the sin of idolatry. With the exception of baptism,
they can be administered only by those in full priest's orders, and the pretense to do so by men unqualified is a wrong not only to the faithful who are deceived, but to the Creator, who has established them for the solace and salvation of His creatures. The fees attaching to the confection and bestowal of the sacraments are a valuable privilege of the priesthood, and the temptation was great, for graceless laymen or clerics in
the lower orders, to simulate the possession of the requisite faculties, and to betray the unsuspecting, into accepting from their hands the worthless simulacra. In the venality of the fourteenth century this would seem not to have been regarded as an especially grave offence, for in the tax-roll of Benedict XII, the official fee for absolution, for pretending to be a priest, hearing confessions and granting absolution,
is only six grossi, or about three-quarters of a florin. After the outbreak of the Reformation it was regarded as a more serious matter. Paul IV, in briefs of May 20, 1557 and February 17, 1559, defined the offence as subject to the Inquisition, and to be punished by relaxation even when there was not relapse. Sixtus V felt compelled to re-issue the brief of Paul, and Clement VIII, in 1601, confirmed the
acts of his predecessors, authorizing prosecution by either the Inquisition or the Episcopal Ordinary. This was applicable only to culprits who had reached the age of twenty-five, but Urban VIII, in 1627, reduced the limit to twenty. This repetition of legislation shows the stubbornness of the evil and the papal determination to suppress it. Even complicity was sternly punished, for in 1619 a layman assisting a celebrant whom he knew to be unqualified was tortured
for intention, made to abjure de vehementi, to serve five years in the galleys, and was perpetually suspended from assisting at mass. Cardinal Scalia, however, states that when the offence was committed through thoughtlessness, relaxation was commuted to ten years of galleys, there was no hesitation in inflicting the full penalty in appropriate cases. As late as July 18, 1711, Domenico Spalaccino, a hardened offender who had lived for five
years by celebrating Mass in Rome, Loreto, and other places, was relaxed and condemned to be hanged and burned. He was duly hanged in the Piazza di Campo dei Fiori. The body was fastened to an iron stake on a pile of wood and was reduced to ashes which were gathered up and buried. In Spain the matter was treated less seriously. The Inquisition at first did not regard itself as having jurisdiction unless there were misbelief as to the sacraments.
A Carta Accordada of January 31, 1533, instructs the tribunals that in these cases the culprit is to be asked whether he thought himself possessed of the power, or whether he had anywhere heard it so asserted as an opinion, and what was his intention. If he acknowledges no erroneous belief, the matter does not concern the Inquisition, and he is to be handed over to the Magistrate. The briefs of Paul IV were not admitted in Spain, and the matter slumbered until 1574,
when on January 13th the Suprema addressed to the tribunals a circular inquiry, asking whether there had been any prosecutions for this offence. If so, on what grounds was the jurisdiction based, what form of procedure was followed, and what penalty was inflicted. Also opinions were asked as to how such cases should be treated. Evidently no attention had as yet been paid to the question.
The replies showed that there was no general policy, and a brief of August 17th of the same year was obtained from Gregory XIII, reciting that in Spain there were conflicting opinions whether the Inquisition had or had not jurisdiction, wherefore he granted to it exclusive cognizance, and forbade the episcopal courts from entertaining such cases. Notice the Supreme Assent, November 26, to all the tribunals with orders to prosecute
in such cases, and to introduce a corresponding clause in the Edict of Faith. It is evident that the Spanish Inquisition did not share the horror felt in Rome for such offences, and this is manifested in the comparative moderation of the penalties inflicted. About 1650 a Spaniard in Rome, writing to a friend at home and comparing the severity of the Italian Inquisition with the mildness of the Spanish, instances the Roman torture
of bigamists and soliciting confessors, the longer terms of galleys for the former and the implacable relaxation of those who celebrate Mass without ordination. There was no such ferocity in Spain. No time had been lost in assuming the jurisdiction, and already in 1575 there was a culprit in a Toledo auto, Fray Alonso Garcia, a Franciscan who had celebrated Mass and heard confessions
and whose sentence was merely abjuration de levy and four years galley service. The most complete discretion was exercised, and the penalties varied in the same tribunal according to the circumstances of the case and the temper of the inquisitors. Thus, in Toledo in 1578, Pero Juan Cusito, a student who carried forged certificates and had confessed many persons, absolving them and imposing penance, appeared in an
auto, with halter and candle, abjured de levy and had two hundred lashes and three years of galleys. In the same year, a Frenchman, named Pierre Saletas, accused of having for twenty years heard confessions and celebrated Mass on forged certificates, was tortured without confessing, and was banished the kingdom for four years, and forbidden to administer sacraments without genuine certificates. In 1600, Baltazar Rodriguez, a deacon, appeared
in an auto, Abjord de Lévy was suspended for ten years from the exercise of his orders with perpetual disability for promotion and had six years of galleys. In the same year the mercenarian, Fray Gregorio de Palacios, was spared appearance in an auto, but Abjord de Lévy had fifty lashes and was recluded for three years in a monastery of his order.
In 1622 at Valladolid, the Franciscan deacon Fray Juan Tapia, for celebrating Mass, was merely ordered to keep his convent as a prison, and to present himself when summoned. Somewhat greater severity was shown to Fray Antonio Frecciaro, a Trinitarian subdeacon, who for publicly hearing confessions was required to abjure de levy, was suspended from his functions for two years, during which he was recluded in his convent, was disabled for
promotion and had some spiritual penance. It would be useless to multiply examples of this diversified moderation. I have met with but one case in which the papal prescription of relaxation was obeyed, and this occurred in Mexico in 1606, when Fernando Rodríguez de Castro, a mulatto, was relaxed for administering sacraments without ordination.
But this was no precedent for, in the great auto of 1648, Gaspar de los Reyes was sentenced to two hundred lashes and the galleys for life, and Martín de Villavicencio Salazar to the same scourging and five years of galleys. The systematic writers assure us that the papal decrees were not received in Spain, and that the punishment varied with the nature of the case,
consisting usually of scourging, unless the offender was a frail. The galleys, exile, reclusion, degradation, suspension of functions, etc., varied at the discretion of the tribunal, and that in cases of minor culpability it could be commuted for money. Relaxation was kept in view only for some error in faith persistently held,
a purely academical supposition. although the culprit was exhaustively examined as to his belief in the necessity of priestly orders to the validity of sacraments. That ecclesiastics between themselves in reality attached but little importance to the offence may be inferred from the case of the mercenary and fray Pedro de la Presentación, who celebrated Mass when only in subdeacon's orders.
The Toledo Tribunal condemned him, June 16, 1662, to three years of galleys. The superior, of his order, at once interceded for him, and in September the Suprema commuted the penalty to three years' reclusion in a convent, with three years' subsequent exile from Daimiel, Toledo, and Madrid. When only ten months of the term had expired, the provincial of Castile applied for the remission of the remainder, but in vain, and when two years
had passed the effort was renewed. Evidently the good frails wrecked little of the idolatry into which he had plunged all who were present at his ministration. As the eighteenth century advanced, a still more lenient view seems to have obtained. In 1749 the case of Fray Juan de Santa Rosa, a Franciscan deacon, was an aggravated one, for he had administered the sacraments of baptism, the Eucharist, penitence, and matrimony.
But the Toledo tribunal only declared him irregular for promotion, suspended him from the diaconate for two years, and imposed fifteen days of spiritual penance. no special expectation of amendment earned this benignity for his provincial was instructed to send him to a convent from which he was not to go out alone so as not to expose him to relapse under the restoration there was leniency difficult to understand The sentence of the Dominican Fray Tomás García by the Cuenca Tribunal, November 14, 1816, for celebrating Mass without priests' orders, was that the commissioner of Vilescuza was to
reprimand him in presence of the superior of his convent, pointing out the severe penalties provided by the papal decrees and prescribing spiritual penances for a year, besides informing the prelate that he could not ascend to full orders. This was confirmed by the Suprema with the addition that he be transferred to a house of stricter observance. December 11th of the same year, Angel Sampaio, a married layman of Campo Ramiro, Lugo, was
convicted of celebrating Mass. The Suprema alludes to his attentato horrible, but merely orders him to be reprimanded and sent back to his home, where the parish priest and his father are to keep watch over him. In connection with this subject it may be mentioned that the Inquisition also took cognizance of a class of cases alluded to above under solicitation, in which laymen managed to hear
confessions of women not with a view to administer the sacrament of penitence, but through jealousy, or for the opportunity of asking indecent questions, or in the hope of listening to prurient details. These cases were by no means infrequent. In 1785 there were three before the tribunal of Valencia, in 1793 one in Murcia, in 1796 Joseph Harranz was prosecuted in Madrid for doing this in order to hear his wife's confessions. The same year there was a case in Seville,
in 1797 one in Barcelona, and in 1807 Miguel Dominguez, sacristan of San Miguel de Niebla, pretended to be a Capuchin, with the object to listening to the confession of a woman. With what severity such cases were treated I have not been able to ascertain.
