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 struggle continued and, soon after 1690, Carlos II was induced to
issue an order that all Jansenists and Rigorists and other innovators
should be dismissed and excluded from all offices and preferment,
secular and ecclesiastical. Under this decree some of the prominent
Jansenists were deprived and exiled, among them five doctors of
Louvain--Gummare Huygens, E. van Geet, G. Baerts, R. Backz and Willem
van den Enden. The persecuted sect appealed to Rome and procured from
Innocent XII a brief of February 6, 1694, addressed to the bishops,
forbidding that any one should be defamed for Jansenism on vague
charges, or be excluded from any spiritual function or office unless
convicted, in the regular order of justice, of having merited a
punishment so severe. This trammelled episcopal action, for it was
represented that the bishops could not be expected to undergo the
expense and the labor of regular trials requiring absolute proof and
subject to legal cavils, but it did not affect the secular arm and the
Elector of Bavaria, then Governor of Flanders, reiterated in October and
November 1695, to the Councils of the Provinces and the University, the
repeated royal orders to exclude from all ecclesiastical dignities and
secular employment those suspected of Jansenism and Rigorism. Then, on
March 1, 1696, Carlos modified his decrees in a manner to embolden the
schismatics, who seem to have had abundant popular and official support.
We hear of a writing in defence of the Catholic party being publicly
burnt by the executioner in Brussels, in front of the palace and, on
January 29, 1698, the people of Brussels went tumultuously to the
Archbishop of Malines, Ferdinand de Berlo de Brus, demanding that he
should withdraw his opposition to N. van Eesbeke, who had been appointed
by the chapter of the church of Sainte Gudule as their parish priest.
This condition of affairs led the Jesuit General González to address a
memorial to Carlos warning him that this spirit unless suppressed would
lead to the ruin of religion and the destruction of his dominions, and
supplicating, in terms much less respectful than Spanish custom
required, that he should represent to the pope the dangerous
consequences of the papal brief, that he should punish those who
procured it as well as the authors of a memorial presented to Carlos in
1696 and that he should order the Flemish bishops to disregard the
pretexts put forward as to vague accusations. The Jesuits overshot the
mark in this insolent interference, and the memorial was suppressed by
the Spanish Inquisition, in a decree of September 28, 1698, as insulting
to the authorities, secular and ecclesiastical, of Flanders.[588]
* * * * *
[Sidenote: _QUARREL OVER CARDINAL NORIS_]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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