La inmunidad eclesiástica en la Alcaldía Mayor de San Luis Potosí: ¿Un enfrentamiento entre fueros?

Abstract

The judicial reality of the Potosi courts during 17th and 18th centuries in the matter of ecclesiastical immunity is here presented and analyzed from the legislative and doctrinal frames from Castile and the Indias. Many shades can be observed on this subject, and the scenario will be somewhat different to the Castilian model which governs it, forming a procedural style of its own that is as much generated from the procedural objective of the exercise of the asylum that both the secular and the ecclesiastic judges, or even the same criminal, persecute: to make justice, to impose their law, to evade the action of justice, respectively. The interaction between jurisdictions is presented: the same that will lead, sometimes, to the judicial secular-ecclesiastic confrontation, or cases of extreme indifference on the part of the real judge to ask for the extraction of the criminal from the refuge, or even the extreme protection of the criminal by the religious authority.