Volume 39 — Petition for Dominican Missionaries

This religious province administers the functions entrusted to it without any worldly advantage, receiving neither imposts nor fees for burials, marriages, feast-days, or sermons—its religious being supported only by the stipend which your Majesty assigns to the ministers in the mission villages; and from this amount they spend much and distribute [alms] among the poor and needy Indians of their districts. Nor is there in any convent of the said province any fixed income; nor has the province ever accepted deposits or valuable articles, or permitted its individual religious to keep these things in their cells, or anything except a breviary and the holy Bible, for the preaching of the holy gospel. Their clothing is of coarse, rough frieze without, and their inner garments of what your Majesty (whom may God guard) grants them as alms. All this is evident by the publicity of the facts, and by official information which on various occasions has been sent to the glorious Catholic sovereigns, your Majesty’s predecessors, and to their royal and supreme Council of the Indias by the governor and royal Audiencia of the islands, and the cabildos, ecclesiastical and secular, of the said city of Manila.

In order to provide those who should go, and to find the number for whom your Majesty shall be pleased to grant permission, to obtain information about them, to examine into their virtue and learning, and to secure a judicious choice, the petitioner needs about a year, in which time he can go personally to the convents of the three provinces of España; for the importance of so delicate a matter will not permit that it be entrusted to letters alone. Accordingly, he should have at least the time until St. John’s day next, or when the first fleet shall be equipped; otherwise he cannot sail from España and make a voyage to Filipinas with religious. To reach those islands, two years are usually required, and at the very least more than one year; and by that time eleven or twelve years will have passed since the last permission [of that sort]. In that protracted course of time, there must necessarily have occurred many deaths among the laborers who work in that vineyard—of whose labor and conversion of souls God has made watch-towers for our sovereigns the Catholic kings of España, and for their royal and supreme Council of the Indias, upon whom is laid this heavy weight of obligation—in fulfilling which they have always made every exertion, giving permissions, orders, means, and aid to the ministers who have gone thither to cultivate that field.