Pope Innocent, despite his friendship with Miguel de Molinos, the Spanish mystic and proponent of the doctrine of Christian perfection known as Quietism, had allowed Molinos to be arrested by the papal police and tried for personal immorality and heresy in 1685.

Some twenty thousand of his letters have been examined, and he and numerous witnesses have been interrogated, resulting in his sentence to life imprisonment and the condemnation by Innocent, in 1687, of sixty-eight propositions embodying Molinos' doctrine.

Innocent is amenable to the plans of Europe’s Grand Alliance to subdue Louis XIV of France; it is a decision from which the Republic of St. Peter will never recover.