Spain and Her Colonies, Compiled from the Best Authorities
History
Spain and Her Colonies, Compiled from the Best Authorities
Spain -- History
Affirming that they had the direct consent of his holiness the Pope,
they menaced with excommunication whosoever attempted to impede them in
their free peregrination. Five years after the foundation of Manila, the
city and environs were infested with niggardly mendicant friars, whose
slothful habits placed their supercilious countrymen in ridicule before
the natives. They were tolerated but a short time in the islands; not
altogether because of the ruin they would have brought to European moral
influence on the untutored tribes, but because the bishop was highly
jealous of all competition against the Augustine order to which he
belonged. Consequent on the representations of Fray Alonso Sanchez, his
majesty ordained that all priests who went to the Philippines were, in
the first place, to resolve never to quit the islands without the
bishop’s sanction, which was to be conceded with great circumspection
and only in extreme cases, while the governor was instructed not to
afford them means of exit on his sole authority.
Neither did the bishop regard with satisfaction the presence of the
commissary of the Inquisition, whose secret investigations, shrouded
with mystery, curtailed the liberty of the loftiest functionary, sacred
or civil. At the instigation of Fray Alonso Sanchez, the junta
recommended the king to recall the commissary and extinguish the office,
but he refused to do so. In short, the chief aims of the bishop were to
enhance the power of the friars, raise the dignity of the colonial
miter, and secure a religious monopoly for the Augustine order.
Gomez Perez Dasmarinas was the next governor appointed to these islands,
on the recommendation of Fray Alonso Sanchez. In the royal instructions
which he brought with him were embodied all the above mentioned civil,
ecclesiastical and military reforms.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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