Note 62 — Chapter XIV

Much did the Catholic governor grieve over entering upon his office without the benediction of the archbishop, and at finding the people of the city as a flock without a shepherd, their consciences loaded with scruples over matters of so much importance, and all of them perplexed and entangled in these dissensions; and therefore he resolved, with firm purpose and heroic determination, to cause the archbishop to be restored to his church. The opposition which he encountered among the auditors in his efforts to secure this cannot be expressed; but he firmly maintained his resolution, even to the extent of saying that he would restore the archbishop, even if it should cost him his head. He consulted the religious orders, asking them to give him their opinions, on the basis of law, both civil and canonical. I have not seen what the other corporations replied, which I suppose must have been what the governor desired; but I know well that the Order of St. Augustine adduced many and very substantial arguments in favor of the restitution of the archbishop to his church, and this with many citations from the authors on whom the auditors had taken their stand—who, as the royal Council of the Indias afterward declared, were greatly at error in their method, according to what the royal laws ordain in case it should be necessary to enforce the penalty of banishment against any prelate. The same error was committed by the capitulars of the ecclesiastical cabildo in declaring and proclaiming a vacant see, through their misunderstanding of the chapter Si Episcopus, “De supplenda negligentia prælatorum,” in VI62—an error which afterward cost them all so dear, especially the dean, Don Miguel Ortiz de Cóbarrubias.