Decree for Despatch of Missionaries


The King: To Gómez Pérez Dasmariñas, knight of the order of Santiago,
my governor and captain-general of the Filipinas Islands. After reading
what you wrote me recently in regard to the need of those islands for
religious to carry out our obligation to the conversion and instruction
of the natives, I have ordered the needful despatch put thereto,
so that at the present one hundred religious are going there--to
wit, forty Augustinians, twenty-four Dominicans, eighteen descalced
Franciscans, and eighteen of the Society. Furthermore, additional
missionaries shall be sent until the need is met. Now because I have
learned that better results will be obtained by assigning each order
to a district by itself, and more emulation will ensue among them
without their embarrassing one another, or their work overlapping,
as might happen if they were assigned to districts regardless of
order, I command you, together with the bishop of those islands,
to divide the provinces, for the said instruction and conversion,
among the religious of the orders, in such a manner that where
Augustinians go there shall be no Franciscans, nor religious of the
Society where there are Dominicans. Thus you will proceed, assigning
each order to its province; taking note that the province allotted to
the Society must have the same manner of instruction as the others;
for this same obligation rests upon them there as upon the others,
and it does not at all differ from them. Given at Aranjuez, April 27,
one thousand five hundred and ninety-four.