A History of the Inquisition of Spain; vol. 4Lea, Henry Charles
History
A History of the Inquisition of Spain; vol. 4
Lea, Henry Charles
Inquisition -- Spain
the Virgin had exhausted God she removed him and placed him in the
manger, with other equally filthy topics. Fray 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 Arias 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 licence of any preacher or confessor found
to be insufficient. The visitors came on April 13, 1592 and reported on
the 17th. The frailes were examined separately and secretly and, of
twenty-two, all but one offered objections to opinions uttered by Fray
Joseph. From their testimony was extracted a series of nineteen
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 Arias Montano at the expense
of other expounders of Holy Writ, of advising a fraile to study
Scripture in place of books of devotion and much else of the same
nature. The frailes had learned the processes of the Inquisition; they
submitted these propositions for qualification to Gutiérrez Mantilla,
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 Wickliffitism 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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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