Ascension in the clergy, obstruction in the Inquisition: the colonial Portuguese ecclesiastical elite that was rejected by the Court of the Holy Office

Abstract

This article examines the rejected applications of members of the Portuguese colonial ecclesiastical elite to the Inquisition’s licenses, in an attempt to identify the main reasons for the veto of these priests in the inquisitorial career. The listing of incomplete licenses of the Court of the Holy Office allowed us to identify dozens of priests who occupied prestigious positions in the dioceses of the empire, acting in functions such as dean, cantor, archdeacon, or even in the ecclesiastical courts, as vicar of the court or vicar general, but who ended up being rejected for posts in the Inquisition for two particular reasons: having bad behavior or New-Christian origin. The research identifies the strategies employed by controversial priests in their quest for a commissary position after having attained prominent ranks in overseas cathedrals. The central argument is that, while the access to the high diocesan hierarchy of the colonial territories could serve as a platform of distinction for priests of questionable honor, given the greater possibility of establishing authority in the colonial worlds, which were more distant from the normative and governing center, the same was not true for the appointments to the Holy Office, due to the more demanding and more centralized control of the institution’s recruitment policy.