Article XX

If any writings or trials should bring to light the heresy of a person deceased, let proceedings be taken against him—even though forty years shall have elapsed since the offence—let the fiscal accuse him before the tribunal, and if he should be found guilty the body must be exhumed.

His children or heirs may appear to defend him; but should they fail to appear, or, appearing, fail to establish his innocence, sentence shall be passed upon him and his property confiscated.

It will, of course, be obvious that since no good or useful purpose could be served by instituting proceedings against the dead, nothing but cupidity can have inspired so barbarous a decree as this. The avowed object of the Inquisition—and very loudly and insistently avowed—was the uprooting of heresies to prevent their spread, and the inquisitors maintained that it was a painful necessity thrust upon them by their duty to God to destroy those who persisted in heresy, lest these, by their teaching and example, should contaminate and imperil the souls of others. Thus the Inquisition justified itself, and removed all doubt as to the purity of its motives.

But how should this justification apply to the trial of the dead—even though they should have been dead for over forty years?

The provision, however, was not Torquemada’s own. He followed in the footsteps of earlier inquisitors. He found his precedent in the 120th question propounded by Eymeric—“Confiscatio bonorum hæretici fieri potest post ejus mortem.” In this the author of the “Directorium” lays it down that although in civil law legal action against a criminal ceases with his death, such is not to be the case where heresy is concerned, on account of the enormity of the crime. (It may seem that, had he been quite honest, he would have said, “on account of the profits that may accrue from the prosecution.”)

Heretics, he pursues, may be proceeded against after their death, and, if convicted, their property may be confiscated—and this within forty years of their decease—depriving the heirs of all enjoyment of it, even though the third generation should be in possession.

All that Torquemada did was to extend the term of procedure beyond the forty years to which Eymeric had limited it.

And to the foregoing Eymeric adds that, should the heirs at any time have acquired knowledge that the deceased was a heretic, they shall be censured for having acted in bad faith and kept the matter secret! By this he actually puts it upon men to come forward voluntarily and accuse their dead fathers or grandfathers of heretical practices, to the end that they themselves may be rendered destitute and infamous to the extent of being incapacitated from holding any public office or following any honourable profession—and this though they themselves should be the most faithful of Catholics, untouched by the faintest breath of suspicion!

It is beyond words a monstrous and inequitable enactment. Yet, like all else, they can justify it. If there is one thing in which the inquisitors were truly admirable, it is in the deftness with which they could justify and reconcile with their conscience the most inhuman practice. They would answer questions as to the lawfulness of this proceeding by urging that they did it with the greatest reluctance, but that their duty demanded it to the end that the living should beware how they failed in fidelity to the Faith, lest punishment should overtake them in their descendants after they themselves had passed beyond the reach of human justice. Thus would they represent the act as salutary and to the advantage of the Faith. And since there is at least a scintilla of truth in this, who shall say that they did not tranquillize their consciences and delude themselves that the confiscations were a mere incident which nowise swayed their judgment?

That proceedings against persons deceased were by no means rare is shown by the frequent records of corpses burnt—one of the purposes for which they were exhumed; the other being that they must cease to defile consecrated ground.