Eroticized Devotion, Feigned Religiosity, and "Unnatural" Sexuality Vis-à-Vis the Mexican Inquisition

This essay attempts a history of eroticized religiosity—some of it genuine and some of it brazenly feigned—in colonial Mexico by looking at a number of Inquisition cases from 1610 to the late 1700s that deal with a range of topics including “obscene” religious visions, healing through sexual acts, and the solicitation of male penitents in the confessional.  These cases reveal how religiosity and sexuality merged with one another in ambiguous and contradictory ways.  In one 1610 solicitation case, for example, a Spanish priest named Cristóbal de Valencia asserted to a number of his male penitents that performing fellatio provided a path to sainthood that Saint Peter and the apostles all practiced.  One sixteen-year-old Mayan youth named Pedro Couch told inquisitors that he reluctantly accepted the priest’s sexual advances after being told that those acts “were in the service of God and that through them the angels got to heaven.”  As the case unfolded, it became clear that the priest coaxed and pressured other young men to engage in lewd acts by stating similar lies.  This feigned religiosity contrasts sharply with the 1690 self-denunciation of a Spanish man named Juan Pérez who, suffering repeatedly from melancholia, one day rapturously kissed the hands and feet of a statue of the Virgin Mary and began to fantasize that he was married to her.  Soon thereafter he started to have eroticized visions of the Virgin and invariably fell into the sin of “pollution” (masturbation).  To varying degrees, the cases of Cristóbal de Valencia and Juan Pérez reveal the motivations of individuals who convinced others that certain “sinful” acts were not immoral and that some corporal and sexual practices deemed sinful and heretical in the eyes of the church were not necessarily conceptualized as sinful on a popular level.