Note 19 — JESUIT MISSIONS IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

The lists of Augustinian friars in the Philippines record the names of some thirty members of that order who became insane or demented; and probably similar lists could be given by the other orders. Perez’s Catálogo (Manila, 1901), and Gaspar Cano’s Catálogo (Manila, 1864) present biographical information regarding all the members of the order who labored in the islands from 1565 down to their respective dates of publication; Pérez enumerates 2,467 for the term of 336 years from 1565 to 1901, and of these 1,992 belong to Cano’s period, ending in 1864. Cano names thirty friars (two of them being lay brothers) who died in a demented condition; the first of these was Fray Francisco de Canga Rodriguez (1616), who was 55 years professed. Pérez mentions but twenty-seven of Cano’s list, but adds four others for the years following Cano’s record (1865–1901), a total of thirty-one names. Both these compilers record the facts of dementia among the friars in varied phrases; and Cano speaks (p. 20) of “the many things which there are in Filipinas to cause the loss of one’s mind.” Zúñiga, in his Estadismo, refers to the liability of the missionaries in the islands to suffer mental alienation from homesickness, solitude, and lack of congenial companions, especially in districts where the natives were of low intellectual calibre. When I was a student in Rome, Pope Pius IX had a college (the Pio Latino) opened for Spanish Americans (from Mexico and South America); this was about 1860. The Italians said that the young students from those countries seemed to be especially given to excessive homesickness (nostalgia).—Rev. T. C. Middleton, O.S.A. ↑