ABSTRACT
By agreement with the merchants of Macao, Jesuits were allowed to ship fifty piculs of raw silk on the Great Ship which sailed between Macao and Nagasaki. In the seventeenth century one of the chief figures in the controversy was a Jesuit, Diego de Bobadilla, a professor of moral theology at the College of St. Ignatius in Manila. Bobadilla's precedent was the religious missionaries of India who sent merchandise to Portugal for sale there. The obligation upon clerics in Holy Orders to avoid trading on the galleons was placed by Bobadilla in a very high category, binding under serious sin. This he deduced from the fact that the theologians Navarro and Molina and the Council of Trent put on such activities the serious penalties of suspension and excommunication. The dispute over the propriety of clerical involvement in the galleon trade did not begin in the eighteenth century, but in the sixteenth, almost as soon as the Manila-Mexico route was opened.
