Note 31 — EVENTS IN FILIPINAS, 1764–1800

The natives in northern Ilocos were displeased at the monopolies31 on tobacco and wines, and revolted; but the alcalde-mayor of the province went to meet them, with Fray Agustín Pedro Blaquier,32 cura of Batao, and persuaded the insurgents to disperse without bloodshed. Sarrio held the office of governor but six months. After the death of Archbishop Santa Justa (December 15, 1787), he found it necessary to allow the regular priests to resume the charge of the parishes, as is shown in the following extract from his letter to the king, dated a week after that event, explaining his reasons for this course: “First, because in temporal matters as well as in spiritual is seen a manifest and notorious difference between the villages administered by the regulars and those which are in charge of the seculars of Indian and mestizo (Sangley and Chinese) birth; these are almost the only ones dedicated to the cure of souls, for in all the islands hardly six curas can be named who are Spaniards or Spanish mestizos. It can be said, in general, that the villages which are under the direction of the regulars have adequate spiritual nourishment, which cannot be asserted of those which are in charge of the Indians and mestizos. These, when they receive the name of priest, are not thereby deprived of that innate negligence and indolence with which nature has endowed all these islanders; and hence it results that, given up to idleness, gambling, and other [like] pursuits, they abandon study, and begin to lose whatever fitness [for the office] they may have possessed at the time of being ordained or receiving the curacy. The consequence of this is, that they grow remiss in their preaching and the instruction of their parishioners; these functions they are unable to discharge competently, not only because they are little used to books, but because not many of them are thoroughly instructed in the Latin and Spanish languages, in which those authors have written of whom the curas must avail themselves in order to distribute to their flocks the proper food of doctrine. Once possessed [thus] by ignorance, it is not astonishing that no greater impression is made on their minds by the rigid law of residence,33 or that of the other obligations that are inseparable from the parochial ministry. On the other hand, accustomed from childhood to live in houses of bamboo or wood, they regard stone dwellings with indifference; and to this may be attributed the fact that some of them abandon the parish houses which formerly were the homes of the regulars, and make separate dwellings for themselves. Others, even though they live in the parish houses, take little pains to repair and keep them in good condition. This would be to some extent endurable if their neglect did not also extend to the church building and the ornaments which are used in the divine worship; for it is noticed that there is seldom a church in their charge which is sufficiently clean and well kept, since they do not make repairs in time, or apply to this purpose any of their perquisites. These they spend for their own use and on their own families, who inevitably remove from their own natal village to that of the curacy, and thus become even more slothful than they are by nature. They are quite unlike the regulars, who, being reared in different principles and trained in the purest teachings of our Catholic religion, generally have no other aim than that of the proper care of their churches.”