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REFOCUSING ON MGR ANASTASIUS HARTMANN 481 3. Hartmann as Administrator efBombqy It was in this emergency that Mgr Anastasius Hartmann was called upon to move to Bombay and as a stopgap measure to substitute for Mgr Whelan. He was to be the Apostolic Administrator of the Vicariate till the Propaganda Fide had worked out a lasting way out of the impasse. On 28 March 1850 Mgr Hartmann reached Bombay accompanied by his secretary Ignatius Persico (1823-1895) 21 and the grimness of the prevailing mood in the Vicariate is viv– idly painted by E.R. Hull in his appraisal of the decade (1840-1850) that was just slipping past: The tension grew as the years went on till it reached a climax in 1848, when for two years Bombay was ecclesiastically a regular hell - a microscopic miniature of the French Revolution, one might almost call it, with the guillotine left out; and this was the state of disorder inherited by Dr Hartmann in 1850, which it was his heroic task to face 22 • The first two letters given above take their origin right in the thick of this murky situation. Bombay had become a thorny problem of overlap between the Propaganda Fide and the Padroado spheres of authority. The entry into Bombay of the Carmelite missionaries representing the Propaganda line of ju– risdiction at the instance of the British authorities in 1720 had not once and for all rung down the curtain on the administration of the region by the Padroado regime. In 1794 a truce was declared under the auspices of the British by hav– ing the four parishes apportioned between the Propaganda and the Padroado lines of ecclesiastical governance. This pragmatically Solomonian arrangement notwithstanding, the situation remained rather fluid. Even though no mention of Bombay and Goa had been made in his Apostolic Letter Multa praeclare (24 April 1838) Pope Gregory XVI had expressly ordained that all ecclesiastical authority in the Vicariates of Cranganore, Cochin and Mylapore in India would be vested in the hands of the respective Apostolic Vicars immediately subject to the Holy See. As far as the Padroado high-ups were concerned, this fore– bode a direct confrontation with Rome. The papal letter had unambiguously stipulated that the Apostolic Vicars were the only ecclesiastically legitimate authorities in the areas assigned to them. Furthermore, the supplanting of the della religione va sempre peggiorando, mi pare, da giorno in giorno. Monsignore Whelan e troppo &ettoloso, impaziente, iracondo e fa percio sciocchezze ogni giorno". 21 Ignatius Persico; Italian Capuchin; 1854: coadjutor to Hartmann in Bombay; 1856: apostolic vicar ofAgra; 1866: special emissary to USA and Ireland; 1893: cardinal. 22 Hull, Bombqy Mission-History, I, 371.