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A Dominican priest renounced Catholicism and confessed to getting rich off tithes
Source: Situado and Sabana #82
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The English-born Dominican Thomas Gage, who in the 1630s was assigned to the two towns of Mixco and Pinola in Guatemala, later renounced Catholicism and penned for Oliver Cromwell's benefit a self-incriminating account of how a priest could accumulate a fortune at his parishioners' expense. All the Pokoman Indian towns of his valley, he said, were subordinate to the prior and cloister of Guatemala, and the friars who ministered to them were expected to surrender to that cloister whatever they collected above what it took to maintain them and their servants. He, however, had sent 450 pesos a year to the cloister (50 pesos more than his predecessor had) and had pocketed the difference. His two stipends alone came to 420 pesos. Each month the alcaldes and regidores of Mixco paid him 20 crowns, or pesos, and those of Pinola, 15, paid for by a Guatemalan variant of the "sabana system" introduced in Chapter 10. Gage explained: "To meet this payment the towns sowed a common piece of land with wheat or maize, and kept their book of accounts, wherein they set down what crops they yearly received, what moneys they took in for the sale of their com, and in the same book I wrote down what every month I received from them." In addition to his stipends, Gage took in 39 pesos a month, or 468 pesos a year, from the various sodalities. The 38 saints' statues in the two churches brought in another 266 pesos a year. The Church's five yearly feasts of obligation were worth 80 pesos, not counting offerings, and certain additional feasts, another 44 pesos. The offerings of the faithful on Christmas, Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, All Souls' Day, and Candlemas came to 260 pesos, and the gifts from the two towns on their feastdays, another 130 pesos. Altogether, feasts and sodalities supplied a minimum of 1248 pesos per annum. Altar fees and bequests from individuals were not inconsiderable: "The communicants, every one giving a real, might make up in both towns at least a thousand reals; and the confessions in Lent at least a thousand more, besides other offerings of eggs, honey, cacao, fowls, and fruits. Every christening brought two reals, every marriage two crowns; every death two crowns more at least, and some in my time died who would leave ten or twelve crowns for five or six Masses to be sung for their souls." His two towns, said Gage, were not to be compared in offerings and other church duties to many other towns about that country. Yet they yielded me with the offerings cast into the chests which stood in the churches for the souls of Purgatory, and with what the Indians offered when they came to speak unto me (for they never visit the priest with empty hands) and with what other Mass stipends did casually come in, the sum of at least two thousand crowns of Spanish money, which might yearly mount to five hundred English pounds." In his five years in Mixco and Pinola and two years in Amatitlan, Gage, after expenses, amassed over 9000 pesos (Gage, 1648). (Bushnell SS)
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