It is the custom here to give to all the monasteries both of this city and those outside it wine and flour from your royal treasury in order to celebrate [mass] each year. Since this church is so poor as appears to your Majesty, we petition your Majesty to order that it enjoy this alms and that sufficient be given of these two articles for that purpose, since the conventual masses which are celebrated in it are for your Majesty to whom this church belongs.
We have also advised your Majesty of two innovations in this church which no other church has. The first is a bench for the wives of the auditors to use which fills a great part of the principal chapel. The other is a very long bench with an inscription in large letters for the officials of the Holy Office. Both are very improper for a cathedral and metropolitan church. From the second it has resulted, moreover, that because a canon of this church had the bench removed one day and shoved over to the wall, for just reason, the commissary who is a Dominican friar excommunicated him and had him placed on the lists as excommunicated. Not content with that he gave the tribunal of Mexico what information he wished, from which it has resulted that after the arrival of the ships from Nueva España at these islands this year he arrested the canon, and kept him in prison for seventeen days and fulminated a cause against him which he sent to Mexico. It is not known where he will stop; and the same may be said of an unbridled letter which the inquisitors wrote to this cabildo, of which we complain more at length to your Majesty in your royal Council of the Holy Inquisition. In this letter we petition your Majesty to please correct this matter, and have these two benches removed. There are just causes for it as may be seen in a letter written the past year of six hundred and one.
Above all we petition your Majesty to consider that this church is so poor that we are unable for that reason to send a person to look after its causes as the religious are doing. The latter are sending persons suitable for the matters that concern them, and so that they may not leave anything undone. We humbly petition your Majesty for correction in this and in all things. We petition our Lord God to communicate to your Majesty grace and ability to serve Him and aid you to govern the kingdoms rightly in which He has placed your Majesty. May He preserve you for us many long and happy years as He is able, and as we have need. Manila, July 3, 1602. Your Majesty’s chaplains and vassals.