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It is impossible to assume that the friars thought of themselves as anachronisms championing a dead past or as superstitious reactionaries, not only because human beings do not see themselves in such terms,but because their endurance and tenacity during and after the revolution

demonstrate the opposite. They drew strength from a vision of themselves as defending the church and Catholic faith against the enemies of religion.

Trinidad H. Pardo de Tavera, 'Los Frailes en Filipinas', Address given before the Club International, Manila, 9 June, 1901 (Manila 1901), 3; and 'The Legacy of Ignorantism (Ignorantismo)', An Address delivered before the Teachers Assembly, Baguio, 23 April, 1920 (Manila, 1921). See Introduction, p p . 23-24.

They were sustained by their conviction that they represented the Kingdom 3 of God against the local agents of an international Masonic conspiracy. This belief that they were the victims of a vast conspiracy led to a strain of paranoia clearly apparent in the books and pamphlets written by Spanish regulars between 1896 and 1907 but they were strengthened at

the same time by a confidence in ’the protection of Divine Providence’, a by no means rhetorical phrase which indicated the basic assumption of

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the friar position. The conviction held by the friars that they were defenders of the true faith surrounded by heretics, conspirators and traitors outlasted the revolution and was confirmed by the challenge of American Protestant missions and the religious schism of 1902 which lost

the Roman Catholic Church in the Philippines perhaps a quarter of its adherents for a generation. The Americans could not convince them to leave the islands or to give up parish work and they reacted with vigorous energy to the competition of the American secular education system.

In .1907 the Manila Council condemned the Iglesia Filipina Independiente as the ’Synagogue of Antichrist', a judgement which indicated that the Roman Catholic hierarchy continued to denounce its opponents in terms of heretical conspiracies although American bishops had by then replaced Spaniards.J Indeed, despite the hopes of the American administration

For examples of this identification of Masonry as the 'cause' of the revolution see 'The Friar Memorial of 1898', Manila, 21 April, 1898, in Blair and Robertson, LII, 234, 255; [Pablo Pastells, S.J.]

La Masonizacion de Filipinas: Rizal y su obra (Barcelona, 1897), 10-11; and Alvarez del Manzano, op. cit., 22-23.

'Friar Memorial of 1898', 231.

Pedro S. de Achutegui, S.J., and Miguel A. Bernad, S.J., Religious

Revolution in the Philippines, I, 362; and see Acta Concilii provincialis Insularum Philippinarum (Manila, 1907), Titulus I, 3.

that the appointment of American bishops would 'normalise' the religious situation, the new bishops adopted within months of their arrival the conspiracy mentality passed on to them by the Spanish friars who became their advisers.^

The Spanish friars' thesis of an embattled church surrounded by 'impiety, secret societies, apostacy and scandals', freemasons,

sectarians, heresy, schism, 'crafty hypocrites' and revolutionaries certainly reflected their own threatened situation between 1896 and 1907 but it was a thesis which they could support with references to contem­ porary statements by the Holy See.^ Furthermore, the position they adopted during the revolutionary period was entirely consistent with the religious culture they inherited from the Spanish Catholic tradition, at least in the form assumed by that tradition in the Philippines by the early nineteenth century. The 'theology of counter-revolution* employed by the friars to construct a reactionary political ideology corresponded with the vested interests of the religious orders, as their critics point­ ed out, but it was not simply as landlords, colonialists, and privileged members of a colonial church that they absolutely condemned the revolution.

Dennis J. Dougherty, Bishop of Nueva Segovia and later Jaro (arrived 6 October, 1903), and Frederick Rooker, Bishop of Jaro (arrived also in October, 1903), became involved in clashes with the civil administra­ tion almost immediately. Governor Taft, who hoped the coming of American bishops would end the hold of 'a particular class of priests' over

the church and lead to religious peace, rebuked Rooker within two months of his arrival for accepting uncritically the friar interpreta­ tion of the religious situation; Taft to Rooker, Manila, 8 December, 1903, Theodore Roosevelt Papers, 'Letters to and from Archbishop Ireland, Bishops Rooker, Hendrick, Brent, and Archbishop Harty1, Washington.

For a succinct statement of the conspiracy thesis by the last Spanish bishop in the islands, see Martin Garcia Alcocer, Bishop of Cebu and Apostolic Administrator of Manila, Pastoral Letter, About the Catholic Unity (Manila, 1902), 1-3.

Above all they condemned it as defenders of what they conceived to be Catholic Truth. Their political position was determined more by their ideology than their ideology was determined by their political position.

That there were contradictions in their position is evident in their statements made at the time and even more when the orders' public writings are supplemented with their private opinions expressed in meet­ ings such as the secret council of January, 1900. These contradictions will be discussed but it is necessary first to identify the basic

elements which made up the friar view of their role and the church in 1896 and to trace the origins of that view from the original sixteenth century Spanish Catholic model, through the modifications of the eight­ eenth and nineteenth centuries. In this chapter, the historical development of the friar world-view will be examined and then, using a selection of important statements by the orders during the revolutionary period, the values, ideas and assumptions which comprised that world-view in the

revolutionary period will be analysed.

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It has already been pointed out that the religious orders consciously evoked a sixteenth century model of the proper relationship between church and state in the colony when they drew up their memorial to the Minister

for the Colonies in 1898. Indeed, they assumed that, despite changes in Spain and the Philippines, the colonial system they advocated was divinely sanctioned and immutable. The character of the islands as a Spanish

colony governed according to religion and morality had been set for ever by a 'solemn promise contracted before the Supreme Pontiffs and before Christian Europe, in accordance with the precepts of our most holy Mother,

the Church’. Spanish colonial rule and the institutional forms

established in the late sixteenth century were defended as if they were part of unchanging Catholic truth. In this sense, at least, the six­ teenth century model of church and state in the Philippines is relevant to understanding the friar position in 1898. They believed they were preserving intact the original character of the Philippine Church as set out in the Patronato and the Laws of the Indies. Considering the great changes which had taken place in Spain and the Spanish empire as well as in the Roman Catholic Church it was remarkable that much of the sixteenth century church actually did survive into the last years of the nineteenth century in the Philippines, as was pointed out in the preceding chapter. There were, nevertheless, crucial differences between the church of 1600 and that of 1898. Quite apart from the challenge of the revolution and the social changes which produced it, the religious orders themselves and the Spanish Catholicism they represented had, beneath the formal continuity of legal codes and theological language, subtly changed. Important

elements in the original vision of the mission enunciated, for instance, in the Synod of 1582, had been lost and other elements exaggerated or reinterpreted. Time itself altered the character of the mission: what had begun as a spiritual adventure had long since become a fixed, inherit­ ed ecclesiastical system bound to a particular colonial structure.

Conservatism and even reaction rather than sensitivity to the changing needs of the faithful were the dominant qualities of the thinking of the orders in the nineteenth century. Nor were the religious orders immune

to the intellectual and social changes they condemned. Beneath the

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theological language of church pronouncements, echoes of the new nation­ alist and racialist theories of nineteenth century imperialism and even of contemporary Social Darwinism can be detected in friar writings towards the end of the 1800s. An adequate evalution, then, of the friar world­ view during the revolutionary period must take account of both the per­ ceived and actual continuities in their position and of changes in the Spanish Catholic tradition which were not always apparent to the religious themselves.

The way the Spanish religious in the Philippines understood their role and defined their missionary labour cannot be understood except in the context of the great debates on the nature of Spanish sovereignty in the New World and the nature of the Indian and his civilisation. Whether or not the Indian had a soul capable of responding to Christian

truth and whether or not his pagan culture was to be destroyed or respect­ ed were questions which preoccupied the religious orders and the crown for most of the sixteenth century. We have already referred to this

debate in so far as it determined church-state relations in the Philippines but it is necessary in attempting to analyse the system of values and

ideas held by the religious to examine the conflicting theories of the nature of the Indians upon which the other theories of church and state depended. Were the Indians capable of entering equally with the Spaniards into the city of God? Were they slaves of the devil given over to idolatry or were they innocent children whose blank souls needed only the right instruction to achieve spiritual perfection? The controversy over these questions above all others divided Spaniards in the sixteenth century and had fundamental and practical consequences for the forumulation and

implementation of colonial policy. Three centuries later in the Philippines its repercussions were still being felt as the Spanish religious condemned

the demands for reform and independence.

The debate on the nature of the Indian and his culture expressed the intellectual preoccupations of a society transformed by a religious and cultural renaissance which saw the foundation of great universities, the integration of the new learning and of Christian humanism i nco Spanish Catholic thought, a general theological revival and the reform of the existing religious orders culminating in the foundation of a new, great

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order, the Society of Jesus. Within twenty years of Columbus' voyage, the Spanish crown had enunciated the Laws of Burgos of 1512 in an attempt to regulate and formalise the relations between Spaniards and Indians in the new American territories, although royal concern with the justice of the conquest and the treatment of the Indians actually went back into the late fifteenth century. The Laws of Burgos, while commanding the

colonists to treat the Indians humanely, expressed, nevertheless, a poor opinion of them. They were to be brought into settled townships under the eye of the Spaniards where good example could teach them civilisation,

'since by nature they are inclined to idleness and vice, and have no manner of virtue or d o c trine'.^ The Laws of Burgos were not, in the

event, definitive, but they began the formal attempt by the Spanish kings to set out the moral and legal basis of race relations in the empire. The New Laws of 1542 advanced the recognition of native rights and pro­

tected them from the exactions of Spanish colonists limiting the rights 9

For a discussion of this cultural and religious renaissance in late fifteenth and early sixteenth century Spain see John Lynch,

Spain Under the Hapsburgs, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1964), I, 58-61.

^ The text of the Fundamental Ordinances of the Laws of Burgos, 1512, can be found in Lewis Hanke (ed), History of Latin American Civiliza­ tion, Sources and Interpretations, 2 vols. (London, 1967), I, 135-44. See also Hanke, The Spanish Struggle for Justice in the Conquest of America (Philadelphia, 1949/1959), 23-25.

of the encomenderos in defence of 'our free vassals', the Indians. The Dominicans, in particular, contributed to the reversal of royal policy contained in the New Laws. In the attempt to define the rights and nature of the Indians it was the religious orders, with their scholarship, religious training, moral authority, and first-hand exper­ ience of the peoples of the New World, who contributed most. Because

of their pre-eminence in theology and the theory of international relations, the Dominicans exercised the greatest influence on Spanish responses in the sixteenth century to the problems of empire, race relations and inter­ national law through the work of such theologians as Francisco de Vitoria

(1480-1546), Melchor Cano (1509-1560), and Domingo de Soto (1494-156).^ The struggle to protect the Indian against exploitation and degradation became a public issue a year before the promulgation of the Laws of Burgos when in 1511 another Dominican, Antonio de Montesinos, preached a sermon in Hispaniola condemning the abuses committed against the people of that island by Spanish colonists. Montesinos set the Dominican position in the subsequent debate when he asked of the Indians: 'Are these not men? Have they not rational souls? Are you not bound to love them as you love

1 3 yourselves?'.

Text in Hanke (ed), Latin American Civilization, I, 144-49; and see the discussion in Hanke, Struggle for Justice, 83-95.

Lynch, op. cit., 61; and see Lewis Hanke, 'The Dawn of Conscience in America: Spanish Experiments and Experiences with the Indians in the New World', Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, CVII, No. 2, April, 1963, 83-92, reproduced in Hanke (ed), Latin American Civilization, I, 180-88.

13

Sermon on the Sunday Before Christmas, 1511, in Hanke (ed), ibid., 121-23.

Montesinos was one of a number of distinguished Dominicans who carried on the tradition of treating the Indians as rational men, equal in the sight of God with the Spaniards and possessing rights and dignity

according to natural law. Francisco de Vitoria, as the leading

professor of theology at the University of Salamanca, passed on this view through his lectures and writings to a generation of missionaries. But, above all, it was Bartolome de las Casas (1475-1566) who emerged as the most famous and influential defender of the peoples of the New

World. It was his arguments, put forward in thirty propositions during

the debate on the justice of waging war against the Indians held at

Valladolid in 1550-1551, that had most influence on the provisions of the

standard law of 1573 which thereaf ter def ined Spanish colonial policy

towards the natives of the empire. It has been remarked that the conquest

of the Philippines was carried on by relatively peaceful means because 14

Las Casas' view prevailed during the 1550s. Las Casas' argument was

that the Spaniards should take to the Indians of the New World 'a good,

gentle, and just God'. To wage war against them was contrary 'to the

law, gentle yoke, light load, and sweetness of Jesus Christ'.^ He

argued, in opposition to the thesis derived from Aristotle that certain peoples were by nature born to slavery, that:

Hanke, Struggle for Justice, 130. For details of the debate see

Hanke, Aristotle and the American Indian, a Study in Race Prejudice in the Modern World (Bloomington and London, 1959), 44-61; and John Leddy Phelan, 'The Problem of Conflicting Spanish Imperial Ideologies in the Sixteenth Century', in Frederick B. Pike (ed),

Latin American History: Select Problems (New York, etc., 1969),

41-63. 15

no nation exists, no matter how rude, uncultivated, barbarous, gross, or almost brutal its people may be, which may not be persuaded and brought to good order

and way of life, and made domestic, mild and tractable, provided that the method that is proper and natural to men is used: namely, love, gentleness, and ki n d n e s s . ^

Rather than being enslaved by the devil, Las Casas saw the Indians as innocent and gentle, lacking only the gospel to be true children of God:

God created these simple people without evil and without guile. They are most obedient and faithful to their natural lords and to the Christians whom they serve. They are most submissive, patient, peaceful and virtuous. Nor are they quarrelsome, rancorous, querulous or vengeful. Moreover, they are more delicate than princes and die easily from work or illness. They neither possess nor desire to possess worldly wealth. Surely these poeple would be the most blessed in the world if only they worshipped the true God?17

For Las Casas, all the people of the world were men with understanding and will. All were attracted to goodness and regretted and abhored evil. All, Christians and infidels alike, were rational beings. All could become Christians, a religion adapted to all the nations of the world. No nation was a nation of natural slaves and the Indians, specific ally, were free men with natural rights and their own lawful rulers. Any sin or idolatry or any other sin however grave did not justify the

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Spaniards depriving them of their rights and properties.

The Dominican defenders of the Indians were moved by considerations of justice and morality inherited in the Thomistic tradition then enjoy­ ing a revival in Spain. The Thomistic tradition was juridical in its

From ’How All Nations May Be Brought to a Good Way of Life’, in the Apologetic History, quoted in Hanke, Struggle for Justice, 126.

^ Colecclon de tratados, 1552-1553, quoted in Hanke, ibid., 11.

^ Hanke, ibid., 125-126; and Phelan, 'Conflicting Spanish Imperial Ideologies', op. cit., 52-57.

concern for justice according to Roman and canon law, ecclesiastical in its preoccupation with maintaining the structures and institutions of the church, and rational in its philosophical attachment to the method-

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ology of Aristotelian logic. In this tradition man is seen as a free agent who nevertheless accomplishes good only by the grace of God whereas the evil he commits is due to his volition alone. God moves all

things according to their nature and m a n ’s nature is to act as a free agent. Man is unique because of his rational soul characterised by

intellect and will. By nature he has the right to cooperate with others in society in the pursuit of personal happiness and the common good. This pursuit of happiness is guided by conscience, by both natural and positive law and by natural virtues. In common with other scholastic theologies, Thomism attempted to systematise revealed truth in a human manner so as to

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