The Dark Box: A Secret History of Confession (9 page)

The phenomenon of sexual solicitation in the confessional during this period is perhaps inseparable from the background of clerical frustrations, inadequacies, and stress. Alcoholism among mendicant confessors was common. Take Fra Gaspar de Nájera, who, reportedly drunk in the middle of the day, attempted to seduce a fifteen-year-old girl in confession, then
followed her from the church back to her home. Only after soliciting sex from nine female penitents was he brought before the Inquisition. In another case, reported to the tribunal in the Canaries in 1784, Fra Antonio de Arvelo, a highly intelligent scholar, was said to be so bored with hearing confessions under obedience to his superiors that he took to the bottle. He would hear confessions lying in bed, the worse for drink. He confessed to the Inquisition tribunal that he tried to guess his penitents’ sins before they confessed them. Eventually he was denounced for attempting to draw women penitents into his bed.
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Some parish priests were in the habit of hearing the confessions of sickly female penitents in their bedrooms. In the 1580s Fra Gabriel de Osca was accused of soliciting four female penitents while they lay ill in bed. On one occasion he offered to soothe one Lucia Hernandez of what ailed her, placing his hand under her shift. When the hand wandered to her thighs, she screamed. On other occasions he reversed the tactic and invited women into his bedroom, where he allegedly lay sick, from which vantage point he was liable to pull the penitent into the bed with him.
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The Inquisition records show nevertheless that 41 per cent of solicitation cases in Spain in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were at least initiated from within the box. The presence of a screen did not stop assignations, and many of the confessionals were in any case rudimentary affairs. There were reports of screens full of holes, which allowed a priest to touch the faces of female penitents. We hear of
a box in a Dominican convent which had a special opening so that the confessor could hold the hands of penitents. We have the story of José Borges of Valencia, who would use the confessional to make regular trysts with his lover. She would then meet with him later in the bedroom of the house of a widow friend of his. Then there was the prior of a Carmelite monastery in Ciudad Real who made dates within the secrecy of the box for subsequent meetings with his amour Maria Lopez Molina.
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Haliczer’s study of sexual abuse in the confessionals of Spain puts the average age of women victims at twenty-seven. Children, whether boys or girls, were not abused in the confessional at that time only because the age of first confession was invariably after puberty. Outside of the confessional, however, we do see instances of sexual acts involving minors. For example, a Franciscan priest, José Nuela, was deprived by his superiors of the right to hear confessions after he was discovered masturbating in front of a young boy.
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Boys in the educational care of priests were not immune from abuse by priests, as shown by the scandal of the Pious Schools and their associated order of teaching priests, founded at the beginning of the seventeenth century in Rome by Father José de Calasanz. The harsh disciplinary regime, imposed mainly on boys from poverty-stricken families, can be surmised by Father Calasanz’s warning that his priestly teachers should not draw blood from the noses and ears of their pupils, or leave bruises or cuts. One of the leading figures of the schools, a Father Stefano Cherubini, went beyond
such masochistic punishments to engage in sexual abuse. We do not have the precise details of his activities, as he and his influential family burnt the documents that had been assembled to report him to the Holy Office. Calasanz, who was eventually canonized for his good deeds for poor youth, moved Cherubini from place to place, where he proceeded to reoffend.
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A
LTHOUGH CULPABLE PRIESTS
and confessors appear to have gotten off lightly—with a suspension for a period of months or years from the right to hear confession—savage punishments were meted out to women who had confessed voluntarily or under torture to alleged sexual deviancy and witchcraft.

The Church had traditionally taught that masturbation was a more grievous sin than rape, since even in the case of rape, the semen was being deposited in nature’s appropriate ‘receptacle’. Female masturbation was deemed to yield a form of semen, too, according to the long accepted sexual biology of the period, hence the deed was every bit as evil as in the case of a self-abusing man. At the same time, mutual masturbation between women was held to be as wicked as sodomy between men. The Italian jurist Prospero Farinacci opined that when a woman ‘behaves like a man with another woman she will be in danger of the penalties for sodomy and death.’ Moreover, ‘if she introduced some wooden or glass instrument into the [vagina] of another’, she should be executed.
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In an attempt to clarify the true circumstances and morality of sexual acts between women, the late seventeenth-century Italian canonist Ludovico Maria Sinistrari wrote a treatise for the guidance of confessors. ‘In practice, it is necessary for confessors to be able to discern the case in which women by touching each other provoke themselves to voluntary pollution and when they fall into the Sodomitical crime, in order to come to a judgment about the gravity of the sin.’ Drawing a parallel between sodomitical men and women, he claimed that women with excessively large clitorises were capable of penetrating a female partner. Moreover, the enlarged clitoris, he argued, was a result of frequent masturbation from childhood. When a woman was suspected of ‘sodomy’ with another woman, he recommended that her clitoris be examined by a midwife. A large clitoris was taken as proof of the case, and the punishment was death by hanging followed by burning at the stake.
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As fear of witchcraft swept Europe with renewed vigour in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, affecting both Catholic and Protestant communities, confession was exploited to discover evidence of diabolism and sorcery in women. No doubt there was a small percentage of women who were practising benign magic, and an even smaller group engaged in maleficent magic, or
maleficium
. Yet of the thousands burnt at the stake (it is thought that as many as 65,000 women and girls were executed in Europe for witchcraft in the early modern period), the majority had been found guilty as a result of inquisitorial confessions obtained by torture, as opposed to sacramental confessions.
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Great doubt has been cast, in retrospect, on the existence of diabolism and witches’ sabbaths—even some of the inquisitors of the day later questioned their earlier conclusions. Alonso de Salazar, having interrogated hundreds of alleged witches who confessed to diabolism, concluded in 1610 that their accounts were ‘nothing but a chimera’. The Italian historian, the late Piero Camporesi, argued in his
Bread of Dreams
that the self-condemnation of many women in hunger-stricken areas of Europe was frequently affected by adulterated breads made with poppy seeds, mushrooms, and all manner of fruits, berries, and roots. The sixteenth-century Lombardy naturalist and doctor Girolamo Cardano, writing on the phenomenon of witches and sorceresses, observed that ‘these wretched little women, living on herbs and wild vegetables . . . hardly differ from those who are thought to be possessed by the devil’. Even Joseph of Cupertino, who was eventually canonised as a saint, believed that he could fly, as did his devotees; yet the explanation for his flights probably owed more to his reputation as a ‘maker of black bread’ than supernatural impetus. Under cross-examination, women likely suffered a form of false recovered-memory syndrome, familiar to this day in cases of alleged ritual abuse. Above all, the accused women were routinely subjected to torture, a supremely unreliable basis for authentic confessions.
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One of the most remarkable confessors of the seventeenth century, and perhaps of any other, was the Jesuit priest Friedrich Spee, who blew the whistle on the Dominican inquisitors in Germany. A scholar and poet, he was employed by the
bishop of Westphalia to hear the final sacramental confessions of women and girls, some as young as ten, before they were burnt to death. Eventually convinced that their extorted inquisitional ‘confessions’ were false, he wrote a tract, published in 1631, entitled
Cautio Criminalis
(Warning to Prosecutors). Writing anonymously and in eloquent Latin, he scorned the Inquisition and suggested that the judges should be liable for damages. Spee showed great courage in standing up to the era’s tide of prejudice. His book made a significant contribution to the eventual decline and suppression of the witch trials. His readership, however, was less numerous than that of the popular
Malleus Maleficarum
(
Hammer of the Witches
) by the Dominican tormentors, which went through hundreds of editions in many languages. Spee was eventually discovered to be the author of the
Cautio
and was exiled to the Harz Mountains, where he ended his days writing elegiac poetry.
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M
ANY ‘HOLY WOMEN’
, known for their outlandish religious behaviour, including trances and excessive asceticism, also found themselves under investigation. Confessors played an important role protecting them from ecclesiastical censure. The era saw the blossoming of high spiritual aspirations, especially within austere religious orders. St. Teresa of Avila became an outstanding reformer in her order of Carmelites while pursuing her own personal spiritual perfection. Her efforts led to a form of mystical abandonment which was
described by her fellow Carmelite, St. John of the Cross, as the ‘Dark Night of the Soul’.
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Teresa insisted that a good confessor was essential for progress in the spiritual life. She preferred, she said, an intelligent and scholarly confessor to an ignorant saint. She went through a number of confessors, not all of them convinced that she was an authentic mystic. One, Gaspar Daza, a saintly man given to missionary zeal and work among the poor, eventually refused to confess her. He thought her voices and visions were bizarre, if not the work of the devil. She commented on his departure: ‘I do not think that my soul would have prospered.’ He was followed by two Jesuits, one old and one young, who both reassured her that her visions were genuine. It was not until she met Father Juan de Prádanos, however, that she rose to new heights of mystical experience. The key to his confessional instruction was that she should abandon a particular friendship as a matter of self-denial. Following his advice, albeit reluctantly at first, she was granted an ecstasy that would be immortalised in Bernini’s famous sculpture. ‘There came upon me’, she wrote, ‘a rapture so sudden that it almost carried me away—something so sure that there could be no mistaking it. This was the first time that the Lord granted me the grace of ecstasy.’
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Unfortunately, Father Prádanos fell ill and died, but he was followed by yet another confessor, the youthful Father Baltasar Alvarez, who was inexperienced in the ambit of high spirituality. When Teresa reported fresh visions and voices, and in particular, the actual, physical presence of Jesus, he
was sceptical. He recommended that she get out more, read more widely, and seek distractions. He became increasingly dubious about her experiences, suspecting that they were diabolical. He was finally convinced of her authentic mysticism, however, after he began to have visions himself. She would keep Father Baltasar for three years, but while he was absent for a period, she took on a substitute confessor, who was convinced that she was possessed by demons and in need of exorcism. With the return of Baltasar, she began to perform levitations, witnessed, it was said, by her community. Other advisers and confessors followed, including Peter of Alcántara (one day to be made a saint), who dwelt in a cell just four and a half feet in length, and who slept no more than an hour and a half a day, breaking his fast only once every three days. He kept constant ‘custody of the eyes’ to guard against lust, and wore a spiked ‘discipline’ around his middle. He was said to have given Teresa much spiritual comfort and confessed to her in turn. After his death, he continued to appear to her, offering further spiritual direction.
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