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Updated: May 15, 2025
San Luis Rey was one of the Missions where a large number of cattle were slaughtered on account of the secularization decree. It is said that some 20,000 head were killed at the San Jacinto Rancho alone. The Indians were much stirred up over the granting of the ranches, which they claimed were their own lands.
It was a reform not unlike that of Thomas Cromwell in the time of Henry VIII., when he dissolved the monasteries, though not quite so violent as the secularization of church property in France in the time of the Revolution.
Marriage is, said Luther, "a worldly thing," and Calvin put it on the same level as house-building, farming, or shoe-making. But while this secularization of marriage represents the general and final drift of Protestantism, the leaders of Protestantism were themselves not altogether confident and clear-sighted in the matter.
The Indians at this Mission represented thirty-five different tribes, according to the record, yet they worked together harmoniously, and in 1830 their possessions included more than 8000 cattle, sheep, and horses. Their crops averaged nearly 2000 bushels of grain per year. The number of baptisms recorded during the twelve years before secularization was over 1300.
His wonderful eloquence and magnetic power for preaching which had won him honors in the Old World even as a newly ordained priest, he had used and adapted for the instruction of thousands of heathens of the New World; and now that christianity and civilization were beginning to bud with springtime loveliness like the Castilian roses he had planted in some of the mission gardens, while the sun of Spanish glory was still in the ascendency and no threatening omens of the fall of Spanish or Franciscan power, or nightmares of the Acts of Secularization disturbed the cloudless skies, while the Presidio Real of Monterey bore the arms of the Spanish King and the Capilla Real do San Carlos was thronged with gallant officers and brave men of the Royal Army and Navy of Castile and Leon, and Our Lady seemed to smile blessings on her Valley of Carmelo, before the beauteous dream, nay, realization of noble ambitions, had vanished like a fair sun, God called His faithful Servant unto Himself, in his cell at his beloved San Carlos Mission about 2:30 P. M. on August 28, 1784, according to the entry of Father Francisco Palou, in the archives of San Carlos Mission, preserved in San Carlos Church of Monterey.
On the other hand, aside from envy, jealousy, and greed, there were reasons why some of the men in authority honestly believed a change in the Mission system of administration would be advantageous to the natives, the Church, and the State. There is a good as well as an evil side to the great subject of "secularization." In England the word used is "disestablishment."
Accelerated, twenty years later, by another trumpet-blast, announcing the formulation of the laws of yet another Dispensation, this process of disintegration, associated with the declining fortunes of a superannuated, though divinely revealed Law, gathered further momentum, precipitated, in a later age, the annulment of the Sharí’ah canonical Law in Turkey, led to the virtual abandonment of that Law in Shí’ah Persia, has, more recently, been responsible for the dissociation of the System envisaged in the Kitáb-i-Aqdas from the Sunní ecclesiastical Law in Egypt, has paved the way for the recognition of that System in the Holy Land itself, and is destined to culminate in the secularization of the Muslim states, and in the universal recognition of the Law of Bahá’u’lláh by all the nations, and its enthronement in the hearts of all the peoples, of the Muslim world.
Manuel Crespo was the comisionado for secularization in 1835, and he and Padre Mercado had no happy times together. Mercado made it so unpleasant that six other administrators were appointed in order to please him, but it was a vain attempt. As a consequence, the Indians felt the disturbances and discord, and became discontented and unmanageable.
Prussia was on her part, however, resolved not to be the loser, and, in the summer of 1797, took forcible possession of the imperial free town of Nuremberg, notwithstanding her declaration made just three years previously through Count Soden to the Franconian circle, "that the king had never harbored the design of seeking a compensation at the expense of the empire, whose constitution had ever been sacred in his eyes!" and to the empire, "He deemed it beneath his dignity to refute the reports concerning Prussia's schemes of aggrandizement, oppression, and secularization."
Their temper was tolerant; and they looked on quietly while Protestantism spread over Southern Germany and solved all doubtful questions which arose from the treaty in its own favour. The Peace had provided that all church land already secularized should remain so; of the later secularization of other church land it said nothing.
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