In carrying on their municipal duties, the local authorities are dependent upon the parish priest. For a report on the conduct of a resident, a hundred of the principal men are not enough; the vital point is having the “O. K.” of the parish priest. In turning in the tax rolls of the neighborhood, his signature is necessary. For the calling to the colors of the young men to whom the lot has fallen to serve as soldiers, the parish priest’s “approved;” to validate accounts and other official documents, the parish priest’s “approved;” in everything and for everything there is demanded as the essential requisite the approval of the parish priest.
In exchange there exists no corrective provision which regulates the conditions under which the parish priest may grant or withhold this approval. He grants or withholds it according to his own free will or as he is directed by his ecclesiastical superiors. The chief local authority is the only one on whom falls this burden of regularizing his acts with the indispensable approval of the parish priest. If the parish priest refuses it, then the chief incurs the discipline of his superiors.
Manifold are the functions of the chief local authority in the Philippines. Aside from his judicial duties, he has charge of the administration, of the tax collecting, of the port, etc., and, given the dependence upon the parish priest in which he finds himself, it is not to be wondered at that the latter controls even to the official correspondence, in fact retaining the right to authorize its transmission.
Orders from above are complied with when it so pleases the Most Reverend Parish Priest. If the higher authority attempts to impose and require energetic compliance with his commands, the parish priest communicates it to one of the superiors of his order, and this obtains the overthrowing of the official. For it he has an argument incontrovertible and of magic effect, to wit, that it endangers the national indivisibility. If it is an effort to open a road and the parish priest doesn’t want it, then it endangers the national indivisibility. Or if the public health requires that dead bodies should not be taken into the church, still it is no reason,—it would imperil the national indivisibility.
And in everything, the same tendency.
Archbishop Martinez’s Secret Defense of His Filipino Clergy
(Translated from a copy obtained from the Manila Executive Bureau Archives)
Your Serene Highness: The undersigned archbishop respectfully addresses your highness, impelled by a true love of country as well as from a sense of the duty incumbent upon him of working for the tranquillity of his archdiocese. Frequently has it been disturbed and altered by the turning over of the curacies of the secular clergy which some years since were granted to the friar orders. This has been the cause of an antagonism between the two branches of the clergy each time more marked, and is taking a turn which sooner or later can become untoward for our beloved Spain.
Merely to fix the time of the beginning of this antagonism do I mention the royal decree of July 8th, 1826, by which there were restored to the religious communities the curacies in charge of the secular clergy since the second period of the governorship of Don Simon de Anda y Salazar. Just as this measure, as the native priests had those parishes for over half a century and considered them then theirs, they felt it a great hardship each time when, on the death or transfer of one of their number, a friar was put in to replace him. On the death of the parish priest of San Simon, in this present year, the last of the provisions of said royal order was carried out.