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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