Renato Constantino, The Philippines: A Past Revisited (1975)

CHAPTER VI – Monastic Supremacy, pages 64-82

1. Patronato real was the royal authority over the Spanish Church. It is the authority given by the pope to the king of
Spain to determine the limits of mission territories and to have a voice in the assignment of missionaries.

2. Augustinians arrived with Legazpi. They were the first religious orders in the islands. They tried to prevent
the coming of other religious orders.

3. When the Franciscans, the Jesuits, the Dominicans and finally the Recollects came, they had to be assigned
to different regions to prevent quarrels among them.

4. As missionaries, religious orders were not supposed to own lands. However, the pope temporarily revoked
their monastic vows so that they could accomplish their missions until such time that a secular clergy was available
in sufficient numbers to take their place. This allowed the religious orders to amass large tracts of land.

5. The friars became absentee landlords. Supervision of their lands was usually entrusted to a lay brother of the
order. The estate is parceled out to inquilinos (lesses), who themselves had kasama (sub-tenants) to work the land.

6. The inquilinos are middle men. They do not work on the land. They paid a fixed lease or canon in money or in kind.

7. The kasama (sub-tenants) were the ones paying the fixed rent. They get half of the harvest after the fixed rent
was deducted while the inquilino, the middle man, received the other half.

8. Like the the cabeza de barangay and the gobernadorcillo, the inquilino facilitated the exactions of his master.
While the cabeza de barangay and the gobernadorcillio were political intermediaries, the inquilino
was the economic intermediary who shared in the benefits of exploitation.

9. Governors complained of the abuses of the clergy and appealed to the Spanish monarch to curtail their powers.
Friars had grown more powerful than the Crown’s representatives.

10. Fernando Manuel de Bustillo Bustamante y Rueda served as the 37th Governor General of Spanish Philippines
from 1717 until his death in 1719. He was assassinated by friars who forced their way into the governor’s palace
and stabbed Bustamante to death.

He came in conflict with the Church when he investigated the excessive borrowing of the friars from the obras pias
and ordered them to return the money. He had the Archbishop of Manila Francisco de la Cuesta arrested
and imprisoned on charges of having conspired against the government.

11. Friars perpetuated the Spanish rule by appealing to the faith of their converts. They were able to exact obedience
due to awe and fear of God.

12. Excesses and abuses of the friars turned the Church from an accessory to the principal apparatus of colonial
appropriation and exploitation.

13. Hostility against the friars grew with the common experience among the natives of economic exploitation
by the friars to the point of violently demanding for their expulsion.