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.