METHOD Nine of finishing and bringing an end to a proceeding involving the Faith is when the person denounced for heretical depravity, after a careful consideration of the merits of the proceedings with a good panel of | legal experts, is found to have confessed heresy and to be repentant but to have relapsed in reality. This is when the denounced person confesses in court before the bishop or judges that he has under other circumstances abjured every heresy (this being found to be so), and he afterwards believed such-and-such heresy (error), or that he had made an abjuration of a specific heresy (the Heresy of Sorceresses) and later returned to it, but afterwards, adopting sounder counsel, he repents, holds Catholic beliefs, and returns to the Unity of the Church. The Sacraments of Penance and the Eucharist should not be denied to such a person if he makes a humble request, but however much he may repent, he is nonetheless to be handed over to the secular arm as a relapsed person to be stricken with the death penalty. (This is understood of the situation when it is found that he made the abjuration as someone caught in heresy or as someone vehemently and not simply lightly suspected of heresy.)

The procedure to be followed in the case of such a person is as follows. If it is concluded in the mature and thoughtful panel of experts, which is convened several times if necessary, that the denounced person is legally relapsed, the bishop or judge will send to the denounced person in prison two or three upright men (preferably men under religious vows or clerics) | who are zealots for the Faith and who are not suspect or unwelcome in the eyes of the denounced person but welcome acquaintances. These men will go in to him at a suitably chosen hour and speak to him about contempt for this world, the miseries of the present life and the joys and glory of Paradise.