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SECULARIZATION
 The policy of secularization grew out of Philip II's problems with the mendicant orders of Augustinians, Dominicans, and Franciscans, who as regular (meaning "Rule-observing") clergy posed as great a challenge to the royal authority in his day as the encomenderos had in his father's. Under the Patronato Real, which under the Hapsburgs was cultivated into the "Royal Vicariate of the Indies," the Spanish Crown held extensive authority over the Church in the Indies and was responsible for its welfare. The king was both head of State and head of the Church. Through the Consejo de Indias, the vicar-king exercised control in all but matters of doctrine, monitoring papal bulls, receiving ecclesiastical tithes, establishing and supporting churches, making appointments to benefices, setting diocesan boundaries, and dispatching missionaries.

The regular clergy's reluctance to view the Indian parishes which they had carved out of sheer paganism as benefices or custodies to be awarded or revoked by the Crown inevitably brought them into conflict with the secular clergy. The seculars had the backing of bishops and kings, but the regulars had possession and a long memory for the Holy See's concessions to missionary orders, which included the faculties to grant indulgences, lift excommunications, and function in every way as priests. The papal bull Alias felices, 1521, confirmed the orders' right to administer the sacraments in places without a bishop; a follow-up bull, the Omnirnoda, 1522, defined these places as anywhere over two "dietas" from an episcopal seat, a dieta being the unit in which land journeys were measured: 7 leagues per day by Roman law, 10 leagues by Spanish usage. In effect, every mendicant was his own bishop.
(Bushnell SS)

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The pope granted bishop rights to priests in remote places

Source: Situado and Sabana #82