sentences:  Auto-da-fés took place in France, Spain, Portugal, Brazil, Peru, the Ukraine in the Portuguese colony of Goa, India and in Mexico where the last in the world was held in 1850.Nearly five hundred auto-da-fés were “celebrated” by the Roman Catholic Church over the course of three centuries, and thousands of Jews met their deaths this way usually after months of suffering in the Inquisition's prisons and torture chambers.This brutal and public ritual consisted of a Catholic Mass, a procession of heretics and apostates, many of them marranos, or "secret Jews", and their torture and execution by burning at the stake.