1639: The auto de fe of Lima, Peru

ExecutedToday.com ^ | January 23, 2017 | Headsman

[CheshireTheCat]

Lima, Peru on this date in 1639 celebrated a huge auto de fe featuring 72 prisoners. Of these, 12 were executed at the stake, one of whom had the consolation of being already dead by his own hand. (He was punished in effigy.)

Their crime, per the Inquisition, was Judaizing — but we might better consider it today in the vein of terrorism, an idee fixe crawling from a swamp of public insecurities both real and projected: race, religion, geopolitics, and crass opportunism all vying for precedence under the Inquisitor’s cowl.

This post will speak of “Jews” but it’s important to remember that the Spanish empire at this point officially had no Jews: it had forced its Jewish population into exile or conversion. That latter set, Jews who had converted to Christianity under that very Catholic realm’s pressure, thereafter became suspected down the generations of sustaining their Hebraic rites in secret, sapping the Church from within while looking for the odd opportunity to sacrifice a Christian child.

It is uncertain in the end in what proportions these forced converts and their descendants did maintain Jewish devotions versus absorbing themselves into Christianity. But by whatever opinion, these are our “Jews”, conflating as the word often does both faith and race; the terms “New Christians” or “conversos” or “crypto-Jews” are also widely used in the literature and all refer to the same universe of suspected and former (at least somewhere up the family tree) Jews who presented themselves publicly as Christians....

[BipolarBob]

I wonder what God thinks about the Inquisition from His "One True Holy Church? I would think He would be against killing His Chosen people. But as Pope Frankie would say "Who am I to judge".

[Republican in occupied CA]

Nothing good comes of giving religion political power or political authorities the cloak of religious righteousness.

[Verginius Rufus]

The irony is that the executioners probably had Jewish ancestors they didn’t know about. Perhaps remote ancestors from the Visigothic period (the Visigoths did not treat Jews very well), who converted under duress.