Even the natives themselves, at times, went so far as to sue the religious orders in the audiencia. This was done in 1738 when the mestizos of Santa Cruz brought suit against the Jesuits, because the latter had sought to make the residents of Santa Cruz pay for certain improvements in the parishes of that district. These improvements had been authorized by the Jesuits, and from them the society had derived great benefit, while the residents had derived no particular good from them. [826] In 1737, on complaint of the natives, an investigation was conducted by Oidor Calderón which put a check upon certain transactions of the Jesuits in the province of Batangas. It was proved that they had collected rents repeatedly from the Indians for lands to which they had no title. The most significant and decisive judicial authority which the audiencia exercised in ecclesiastical matters, and that which was productive of more conflicts and opposition on the part of the church than any other cause, was the jurisdiction of the tribunal over the secular church courts, at the head of which was the metropolitan tribunal of the archbishop. The method of intervention most frequently followed in cases appealed from the archbishop was by the entertainment of the recurso de fuerza. [827] In this way the civil jurisdiction, acting through the audiencia, could intervene for its own protection, and by means of this special procedure that tribunal actually did restrain the ecclesiastical judges more frequently and effectively in important cases than in any other way. It was on the grounds of fuerza that the audiencia justified its action in practically all cases of interference with the jurisdiction of the church courts.