Note 9 — EVENTS IN FILIPINAS, 1764–1800

When Raón insisted on enforcing the royal rights of patronage, the orders all resisted him, repeating the arguments which they had alleged to Arandía in the like case. The Dominicans declared that they could not obey the governor’s commands until they could receive orders from their superiors in Europe; Raón refused to wait, and the provincial declared that his curas would rather surrender their ministries, but would continue to serve therein until the governor, as vice-patron, should command that these be surrendered to other curas. “This was sufficient to make the archbishop hasten to deliver to the secular clergy, first the ministries of the Parián and Binondo, and afterwards those of the province of Bataan, notwithstanding that he could have no cause for complaint against our religious, who without resistance or opposition had accepted his diocesan visit, as he himself confessed in letters to the king and the supreme pontiff. He found a pretext for proceeding to the secularization of the curacies in Bataan, in the banishment of the Jesuits, whose expulsion from the islands occurred at the same time as the events which we are relating.” “As the ministries in the island of Negros were left vacant in consequence of the expulsion of the Jesuits, the governor addressed himself to our provincial, asking for ministers to occupy those vacant posts. The latter excused himself from this, on account of the lack of religious; and the archbishop made this a pretext for informing and counseling the governor that, since the Dominicans had offered their resignation of the doctrinas in the province of Bataan, on account of the controversy over the right of patronage, the religious who were ministering in that district could be sent to the island of Negros. He offered to provide secular priests in their place, and availed himself of this opportunity to despoil our religious of the curacies or ministries of Bataan. In effect, this was done; and our religious were compelled to abandon to the seculars this province of the archbishopric, in order to go to learn a new dialect and minister to strange peoples in the inland of Negros.” “The bishop of Cebú had no secular priests capable of replacing the Jesuits (as deserving as persecuted), who were administering the island of Negros and the province of Iloilo,… consequently, our religious began to minister in the villages of Iloilo, Himaras, Mandurriao and Molog, in the island of Panay; and those of Ilog, Cabancalan, Jimamaylan, and Guilgonan, in that of Negros. With great repugnance the province took charge of an administration of which the Jesuit fathers had been despoiled in so unworthy a manner; and not only on this account but on that of the great difficulties which arose from this separation of provinces and villages, in the regular visiting of them and in intercourse and the supply of provisions, our fathers abandoned those ministries at the end of some years; and in the meantime the bishop of Cebú undertook to transfer their administration to the secular priests. Thus it was that by the year 1776 our religious had departed from all those villages.” (Ferrando, Hist. PP. dominicos, v, pp. 39, 42, 43.) ↑