The King. To my reverend father in Christ, Doctor Don Diego Camacho y Avila, archbishop of the metropolitan church of Manila in the Filipinas Islands, and member of my Council: In letters of January 19 and February 20, 1698, you report your arrival in those islands, and what you are doing to quell the hatred and enmities which exist among your subjects, reclaiming them to a new life by the measures which you are applying, and obtaining the peace and tranquillity which you were desiring. You also wrote that you had undertaken to continue work on the church building there, and had gone to visit the secular clergy, in which you had met no hindrance; and that in endeavoring to make the visitations in the mission churches served by regulars--according to the regulations of the Council of Trent, the apostolic letters, and the royal decrees--you were influencing the religious by gentle methods to accept such visitation, for this purpose drawing up a manifesto, but that these methods were not sufficient to induce them to do so voluntarily. For this reason, in fulfilment of the obligations of your office you had published an edict for carrying out this visitation, and had actually gone to put it into execution in the mission stations of regulars at Tondo, Binondoc, Santa Cruz, Dilao, and Parián, since you were denied diocesan jurisdiction over the ministers who serve in these places--while at the same time, in those of Tondo and Binondoc (which are served by religious of St. Dominic and St. Augustine) those ministers were abandoning their churches, consuming [39] the holy sacrament, and carrying away with them the holy oils and ornaments. Consequently you found it necessary to place secular priests ad interim in those villages, from which it resulted that the religious orders went to offer their renunciation of those missions before my governor, without going to you; and in this condition of affairs it seemed best to the Audiencia to furnish aid so that the religious orders should not abandon these missions, and that their renunciation of them should not be accepted. But this was not sufficient to prevent the religious from withdrawing from those missions, for which reason you found yourself compelled to retire to your own church, and to desist from these visitations, removing the temporary ministers whom you had appointed, and lifting the censures and penalties which you had imposed, without prejudice to your dignity and jurisdiction. And finally you recount the very harmful results which must follow from the form and method of administration which prevails in these mission stations, and the illegal acts which are committed by the ministers in charge of them, of which you send a summary, stating how impossible you find it to remedy this condition of affairs, on account of the reasons which you point out, and asking that the necessary measures be taken, and that you be assured of it, so that you can visit as you should that archbishopric, in fulfilment