The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898; Volume 46, 1721-1739: Explorations by early navigators, descriptions of the islands and their peoples, their history and records of the Catholic missions, as related in contemporaneous books and manuscripts, showing the political, economic, commercial and religious conditions of those islands from their earliest relations with European nations to the close of the nineteenth century
History
The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898; Volume 46, 1721-1739: Explorations by early navigators, descriptions of the islands and their peoples, their history and records of the Catholic missions, as related in contemporaneous books and manuscripts, showing the political, economic, commercial and religious conditions of those islands from their earliest relations with European nations to the close of the nineteenth century
Demarcation line of Alexander VI; Missions -- Philippines; Philippines -- Discovery and exploration; Philippines -- History -- Sources
Others carried their pretension even to meddling with sacred matters
of the temple and interfering with the parochial dwelling, demanding
from the parish priests that the theological moral preaching, and
the explanation of the Christian doctrine be in Castilian, as if it
were the duty of the parish priest to please four deluded people, and
not to instruct his parishioners who, not understanding Castilian,
would have obtained from the catechism and from the sermon that
which the negro did from the story. The same is true of the demand
that the religious should address their servants in our beautiful
language. Seeing that the Indian servants did the reverse of what their
Spanish masters ordered them, and seeing the desperation of the latter
for the said reason, why should the religious have to be subjected to
like impatience when they could avoid it by addressing their servants
in their own language? So general was the opinion that the religious
were opposed to the Indians learning Castilian that Governor-general
Despujols, in his visits to the Ilonga capital, apostrophized the
parish-priest religious harshly, who had gone in commission to salute
him. "You," he said to them, "are the ones who oppose the diffusion of
Castilian in the country." Such were the words of that Catalonian, who
claimed that a colony separated from the mother country by thousands
of miles, and almost abandoned for that reason until the opening
of the isthmus of Suez, should know and speak the Castilian, which
is not known or spoken as yet in Cataluña, or in other provinces of
España. It was very convenient for the Spaniards who went to Filipinas
on business or as employes, and even necessary for them to understand
the Indians, and they demanded that the latter learn Castilian. It
was also very convenient and comfortable for the religious, since
the learning of a dialect of the country cost them at least a year's
study and practice. But was it not easier and more just that forty or
fifty thousand Spaniards learn the language of the country since they
needed it to live and do business in it, than to make six or seven
millions of Indians, very few of whom needed to know it, learn Spanish?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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