The Philippine Islands, 1493-1803; explorations by early navigators, descriptions of the islands and their peoples, their history and records of the Catholic missions, as related in contemporaneous books and manuscripts, showing the political, economic, commericial and religious conditions of those islands from their earliest relations with European nations to the beginning of the nineteenth century; [Vol. 1, no. 36]

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THE PHILIPPINE ISLANDS

[Vol. 36

means his Excellency was so balked that, the cause
having been fully proved, the evidence received, and
the proofs adduced by both parties, the petition
introduced by the orders was allowed on March 30,
1708; and it was ordered that the necessary official
statements be given them. The authority of the
governor was interposed extra-judicially, and he
ordered that the religious should occupy the abandoned curacies, and that there should be no change.
The archbishop himself, who had put forward that
claim, was obliged to confess that he could not put
it into practice.
724. It was sufficiently clear by that alone that
the holy orders have more than enough reason for the
independence from the bishops that they enjoy in
their parochial ministry. For if they did not have
in their primitive being the causes and motives for
the apostolic privileges which exempted them, even
from that of the ordinaries, it would not have been
possible for them to maintain themselves so long
with that prerogative which could not subsist in the
kingdoms of America. But, since there are some
persons who, as their understanding is on a par with
their bodily senses, register events on the surface only
without going within for the reasons (from which
the report has been originated and spread through
Europa, that the orders of Philipinas have seized all
the authority without other reason than because they
wish it so), I am compelled to vindicate them from
so atrocious a calumny by making known some of the
reasons why they have made (as they still do) so
strong a resistance to this subjection. I shall first
discuss all the orders in common, and then our reformed branch in particular. But I give warning