"Auto-Da-Fe 1926"

At the town of Pollensa on the Island of Mallorca, a grim and awful procession took its way from the Cathedral to the Plaza de la Constitucion.

The local Bishop strode at the head of eight score monks, all carrying funeral candles. The Mayor, the town Council, municipal school children, citizenry followed.

Upon the Plaza de la Constitucion towered a great funeral pyre. From a platform before it the Bishop celebrated mass. Then a match crackled, the pyre towered into flame. For an hour, untiring, zealous, the Bishop cast upon it books adjudged heretical. The first victim was a treatise by erudite philosopher Unamuno, the last a novel by author-poet Blasco Ibanez. Erring news gatherers chronicled this event as an "auto-da-fe"--an extinct form of inquisitional ceremony/- of which the last orthodox examples occurred in the reign of Charles III (1759-1788).

/-Thomas de Torquemada, notorious Grand Inquisitor, celebrated the first great auto-da-fe (circa 1450), which began by a solemn procession of the Holy Office and its functionaries, followed by condemned heretics and penitents. Mass was celebrated and all present--including the King of Spain--took an oath of obedience to the Holy Inquisition. Finally the Grand Inquisitor delivered a sermon and read out the sentences of condemnation and acquittal. Contrary to general belief, the condemned were not burned during the auto-da-fe proper, but were handed over to the civil power, by which they were exterminated hours or days later.