The Inquisition


1520-1813



Bishop Manso, on his arrival in 1513, found Puerto Rico in a state

bordering on anarchy, and after vain attempts to check the prevalent

immorality and establish the authority of the Church, he returned to

Spain in 1519. The account he gave Cardinal Cisneros of the island's

condition suggested to the Grand Inquisitor the obvious remedy of

clothing the bishop with the powers of Provincial Inquisit
r, which he

did.



Diego Torres Vargas, the canon of the San Juan Cathedral, says in his

memoirs: "Manso was made inquisitor, and he, being the first, may be

said to have been the Inquisitor-General of the Indies; ... the

delinquents were brought from all parts to be burned and punished

here ... The Inquisition building exists till this day (1647), and until

the coming of the Hollanders in 1625 many sambenitos could be seen in

the cathedral hung up behind the choir."



These "sambenitos" were sacks of coarse yellow cloth with a large red

cross on them, and figures of devils and instruments of torture among

the flames of hell. The delinquents, dressed in one of these sacks,

bareheaded and barefooted, were made to do penance, or, if condemned

to be burned, marched to the place of execution. It is said that in

San Juan they were not tied to a stake but enclosed in a hollow

plaster cast, against which the faggots were piled, so that they

were roasted rather than burned to death. The place for burning the

sinners was outside the gate of the fort San Cristobal. Mr. M.F.

Juncos believes that the prisons were in the lower part of the

Dominican Convent, later the territorial audience and now the supreme

court, but Mr. Salvador Brau thinks that they occupied a plot of

ground in the angle formed by Cristo Street and the "Caleta" of San

Juan.



Of Nicolas Ramos, the last Bishop of Puerto Rico, who united the

functions of inquisitor with the duties of the episcopate, Canon

Vargas says: " ... He was very severe, burning and punishing, as was

his duty, some of the people whose cases came before him ..."



It seems that the records of the Inquisition in this island were

destroyed and the traditions of its doings suppressed, because nothing

is said regarding them by the native commentators on the island's

history. Only the names of a few of the leading men who came in

contact with the Tribunal have come down to us. Licentiate Sancho

Velasquez, who was accused of speaking against the faith and eating

meat in Lent, appears to have been Manso's first victim, since he died

in a dungeon. A clergyman named Juan Carecras was sent to Spain at the

disposition of the general, for the crime of practising surgery. In

the same year (1536) we find the treasurer, Blas de Villasante, in an

Inquisition dungeon, because, though married in Spain, he cohabited

with a native woman - an offense too common at that time not to leave

room for suspicion that the treasurer must have made himself obnoxious

to the Holy Office in some other way. In 1537, a judge auditor was

sent from the Espanola, but the parties whose accounts were to be

audited contrived to have him arrested by the officers of the

Inquisition on the day of his arrival. Doctor Juan Blazquez, having

attempted to correct some abuses committed by the Admiral's employees

in connivance with the Inquisition agents, suffered forty days'

imprisonment, and was condemned to hear a mass standing erect all the

time, besides paying a fine of 50 pesos.



These are the only cases on record. Only the walls of the Inquisition

building, could they speak, could reveal what passed within them from

the time of Manso's arrival in 1520 to the end of the sixteenth

century, when the West Indian Superior Tribunal was transferred to

Cartagena, and a special subordinate judge only was left in San Juan.

Bishop Rodrigo de Bastidas, who visited San Juan on a Government

commission in 1533, perceiving the abuses that were committed in the

inquisitor's name, proposed the abolition of the Holy Office; but the

odious institution continued to exist till 1813, when the

extraordinary Cortes of Cadiz removed, for a time, this blot on

Spanish history. The decree is dated February 22d, and accompanied by

a manifesto which is an instructive historical document in itself. It

shows that the Cortes dared not attempt the suppression of the dreaded

Tribunal without first convincing the people of the disconnection of

the measure with the religious question, and justifying it as one

necessary for the public weal.



"You can not doubt," they say, "that we endeavor to maintain in this

kingdom the Catholic, Apostolic, Roman religion, which you have the

happiness to profess; ... the deputies elected by you know, as do the

legislators of all times and all nations, that a social edifice not

founded on religion, is constructed in vain; ... the true religion

which we profess is the greatest blessing which God has bestowed on

the Spanish people; we do not recognize as Spaniards those who do not

profess it ... It is the surest support of all private and social

virtues, of fidelity to the laws and to the monarch, of the love of

country and of just liberty, which are graven in every Spanish heart,

which have impelled you to battle with the hosts of the usurper,

vanquishing and annihilating them, while braving hunger and nakedness,

torture, and death."



The Inquisition is next referred to. It is stated that in their

constant endeavor to hasten the termination of the evils that afflict

the Spanish nation, the people's representatives have first given

their attention to the Inquisition; that, with the object of

discovering the exact civil and ecclesiastical status of the Holy

Office, they have examined all the papal bulls and other documents

that could throw light on the subject, and have discovered that only

the Inquisitor-General had ecclesiastical powers; that the Provincial

Inquisitors were merely his delegates acting under his instructions;

that no supreme inquisitorial council had ever been instituted by

papal brief, and that the general, being with the enemy (the French

troops), no Inquisition really existed. From these investigations the

Cortes had acquired a knowledge of the mode of procedure of the

tribunals, of their history, and of the opinion of them entertained by

the Cortes of the kingdom in early days. " ... We will now speak

frankly to you," continues the document, "for it is time that you

should know the naked truth, and that the veil be lifted with which

false politicians have covered their designs.



"Examining the instructions by which the provincial tribunals were

governed, it becomes clear at first sight that the soul of the

institution was inviolable secrecy. This covered all the proceedings

of the inquisitors, and made them the arbiters of the life and honor

of all Spaniards, without responsibility to anybody on earth. They

were men, and as such subject to the same errors and passions as the

rest of mankind, and it is inconceivable that the nation did not exact

responsibility since, in virtue of the temporal power that had been

delegated to them, they condemned to seclusion, imprisonment, torture,

and death. Thus the inquisitors exercised a power which the

Constitution denies to every authority in the land save the sacred

person of the king.



"Another notable circumstance made the power of the

Inquisitors-General still more unusual; this was that, without

consulting the king or the Supreme Pontiff, they dictated laws,

changed them, abolished them, or substituted them by others, so that

there was within the nation a judge, the Inquisitor-General, whose

powers transcended those of the sovereign.



"Here now how the Tribunal proceeded with the offenders. When an

accusation was made, the accused were taken to a secret prison without

being permitted to communicate with parents, children, relations, or

friends, till they were condemned or absolved. Their families were

denied the consolation of weeping with them over their misfortunes or

of assisting them in their defense. The accused was not only deprived

of the assistance of his relations and friends, but in no case was he

informed of the name of his accuser nor of the witnesses who declared

against him; and in order that he might not discover who they were,

they used to truncate the declarations and make them appear as coming

from a third party.



"Some one will be bold enough to say that the rectitude and the

religious character of the inquisitors prevented the confusion of the

innocent with the criminal; but the experiences of many years and the

history of the Inquisition give the lie to such assurances. They show

us sage and saintly men in the Tribunal's dungeons. Sixtus IV himself,

who, at the request of the Catholic kings, had sanctioned the creation

of the Tribunal, complained strongly of the innumerable protests that

reached him from persecuted people who had been falsely accused of

heresy. Neither the virtue nor the position of distinguished men could

protect them. The venerable Archbishop of Grenada, formerly the

confessor of Queen Isabel, suffered most rigorous persecutions from

the inquisitors of Cordova, and the same befell the Archbishop of

Toledo, Friar Louis de Leon, the venerable Avila, Father Siguenza, and

many other eminent men.



"In view of these facts, it is no paradox to say that the ignorance,

the decadence of science, of the arts, commerce and agriculture, the

depopulation and poverty of Spain, are mainly due to the Inquisition.



"How the Inquisition could be established among such a noble and

generous people as the Spanish, will be a difficult problem for

posterity to solve. It will be more difficult still to explain how

such a Tribunal could exist for more than three hundred years.

Circumstances favored its establishment. It was introduced under the

pretext of restraining the Moors and the Jews, who were obnoxious to

the Spanish people, and who found protection in their financial

relations with the most illustrious families of the kingdom. With such

plausible motives the politicians of the time covered a measure which

was contrary to the laws of the monarchy. Religion demanded it as a

protection, and the people permitted it, though not without strong

protest. As soon as the causes that called the Inquisition into

existence had ceased, the people's attorneys in Cortes demanded the

establishment of the legal mode of procedure. The Cortes of Valladolid

of 1518 and 1523 asked from the king that in matters of religion the

ordinary judges might be declared competent, and that in the

proceedings the canons and common codes might be followed; the Cortes

of Saragossa asked the same in 1519, and the kings would have acceded

to the will of the people, expressed through their representatives,

especially in view of the indirect encouragement to do so which they

received from the Holy See, but for the influence of those with whom

they were surrounded who had an interest in the maintenance of the

odious institution."



The manifesto terminates with an assurance to the Spanish people that,

under the new law, heresy would not go unpunished; that, under the new

system of judicial proceedings, the innocent would no longer be

confounded with the criminal. " ... There will be no more voluntary

errors, no more suborned witnesses, offenders will henceforth be

judged by upright magistrates in accordance with the sacred canons and

the civil code ... Then, genius and talent will display all their

energies without fear of being checked in their career by intrigue and

calumny; ... science, the arts, agriculture, and commerce will

flourish under the guidance of the distinguished men who abound in

Spain ... The king, the bishops, all the venerable ecclesiastics will

instruct the faithful in the Roman Catholic Apostolic religion without

fear of seeing its beauty tarnished by ignorance and superstition,

and, who knows, this decree may contribute to the realization, some

day, of religious fraternity among all nations!"



From this beautiful dream the Cortes were rudely awakened the very

next year when King Ferdinand VII, replaced on his throne by the

powers who formed the holy alliance, entered Madrid surrounded by a

host of retrograde, revengeful priests. Then the Regency, the Cortes,

the Constitution were ignored. The deputies were the first to suffer

exile, imprisonment, and death in return for their loyalty and

liberalism; the public press was silenced; the convents reopened,

municipalities and provincial deputations abolished, the Jesuits

restored, the Inquisition reestablished, and priestcraft once more

spread its influence over the mental and social life of a naturally

generous, brave, and intelligent people.



More

;