Introduction - American Jewish Archives

Jose Diaz Pirnienta:
Rogue Priest
J. Hartog
Although the Council of Trent in the sixteenth century prescribed a se-
lection process to weed out the unfit among those who wanted to take
priestly vows or enter monastic orders, it was a long time before the
rules were uniformly applied and executed throughout the Roman
Catholic Church, especially in outlying areas. Even today a strange
bird sometimes flies through the meshes of the net, and in the seven-
teenth and eighteenth centuries, when the lack of rapid communica-
tions made it difficult to conduct thorough background inquiries
about candidates and aspirants, such occurrences were more frequent.
One of the most peculiar cases involved JosC Diaz Pimienta, a Cuban
priest whose life story brings to mind the picaresque novels that were
so popular in Spanish literature in the same period, but in this instance
the picaresco ("rogue") was a real person, and his adventures, howev-
er incredible they may seem, were not a fiction writer's inventions but
true events amply documented by contemporary evidence.
JosC Diaz Pimienta was a scoundrel and con man of the first order,
and apparently emotionally disturbed as well, though it is clear that
few if any of his contemporaries saw through him. A Christian born
and baptized who served a novitiate as a monk and was fraudulently
ordained as a priest, Pimienta chalked up a record of offenses while a
clergyman that would have earned him pride of place on a Church
wanted list if such existed: theft, assault with a deadly weapon, for-
gery, piracy, extortion, sexual misconduct, not to mention a wide
range of disciplinary infractions and personal eccentricities. From the
standpoint of the Inquisition, whose interrogations of Pimienta pro-
vide our main source for the details of his checkered life, his worst of-
fense was his conversion to Judaism. Though he later reverted to
Christianity and maintained that he had adopted Judaism against his
will or perhaps for pecuniary reasons, Pimienta seems to have wavered
between the two faiths for the rest of his life, identifying with one or
the other as his mood dictated, with no consideration for expediency