Coincident with this diminution of material for persecution, there seems to have been a disposition to resort to milder methods, attributable perhaps to an expectation that Judaism would ere long disappear. In 1567, Pius V, at the request of Philip II, empowered Inquisitor-general Espinosa, for three years, to have the Judaizing New Christians of Murcia and Alcaraz absolved, either publicly or privately, with a salutary and benignant, but not pecuniary, penance; clerics, however, were not to be habilitated to obtain orders or benefices.[675] There is a story that Dom João Soares, Bishop of Coimbra, after the Council of Trent, made a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, in the course of which, at Cyprus, he met many Spanish and Portuguese refugees, from whom he gathered information which he communicated to the tribunal of Llerena, resulting in the detection of many Judaizers in Extremadura.[676] They were treated like those of Murcia, for Philip, in 1573, obtained from Gregory XIII a brief similar to that of 1567, for the benefit of the Judaizers of the district of Llerena, except that the faculty was limited to one year.[677] Even greater privileges were granted, in a brief obtained by Philip, in 1597, to the Judaizers of Ecija and its district, for not only were they to be absolved like those of Murcia, but all prisoners under trial were to enjoy the benefit of the pardon, with no note of infamy on themselves or their descendants, and this time of grace was to endure for four years.[678] These may not have been the only instances of such favors, and they indicate a tendency towards an entire change of policy. That there was hopefulness that the Inquisition was accomplishing its work is seen in a careful state paper drawn up for the Suprema, in 1595, by a distinguished prelate, Juan Bautista Pérez, Bishop of Segorbe, who felt justified in assuming that the baptized Jews remaining in Spain, after the expulsion of 1492, had now become good Christians, except one here and there, and that their Law was forgotten.[679] [Sidenote: _INQUISITION OF PORTUGAL_]