Negotiating Church and State in the Revolutionary Philippines, 1898–1900

Abstract

This article examines the series of debates concerning the status of the Roman Catholic Church in the revolutionary Philippines and in doing so demonstrates the contested legacies of the Patronato at the end of Spanish colonial rule. The government of Emilio Aguinaldo in 1898, which in 1899 was inaugurated as a republic, sought to exercise the prerogatives of ecclesiastical patronage as it had been under Spain. By formally regulating and controlling ecclesiastical appointments, the Philippine state addressed the long-standing issue of ecclesiastical secularization (the transfer of parishes from the regular clergy to the secular clergy) that pitted Spanish friars against Filipino diocesan priests, spurring the nationalist movement in the mid-nineteenth century. In effect, the Aguinaldo government assumed the functions of patronage to ensure the fulfillment of nationalist aspirations. Nevertheless, the status of Catholicism in the new nation-state was debated by Filipino laity and clergy even beyond the center of the revolution. Filipino clergy, for their part, almost unanimously rejected government oversight of ecclesiastical affairs despite demanding church-state union and continued government support. Ecclesiastical affairs in this period were in a constant state of flux, negotiation, and dialogue, underscoring the complex and contested legacy of patronage after Spanish rule.

I. Introduction

The Philippine Revolution, one of the key moments in Philippine history, is interpreted in historiography as the complete abandonment of the Spanish Catholic past. Whereas under Spanish rule, church and state were united in the system known as Royal Patronage (Patronato Real or Patronato Regio), the revolution, with its supposed trappings of liberality and tolerance, purportedly marked the disintegration of church-state union. Such an assertion, however, collapses when the preponderance of ecclesiastical affairs in the policies of the Aguinaldo government (1898–1900) is seriously considered. Recurring conflicts between church and state in this period, as it was under Spanish rule, were primarily jurisdictional: the state desired to control the church, but the church asserted its independence from state intrusion. Indeed, in the evocative words of the Jesuit historian Horacio de la Costa, church and state were “two essentially autonomous societies…to bring them together is to project powerful forces not only of attraction but repulsion.” ¹ Although referring to the early modern Spanish Philippines, Costa’s description could very well be applied to the late nineteenth century, at the fall of Spanish rule and the rise of the Philippine nation-state, the latter inheriting the legacies of a system that had been in place for three centuries.

This article examines the series of debates concerning the status of the Roman Catholic Church in the revolutionary Philippines and in doing so demonstrates the contested legacies of the Patronato at the end of Spanish colonial rule. The government of Emilio Aguinaldo in 1898, which in 1899 was inaugurated as a republic, sought to exercise the prerogatives of ecclesiastical patronage as it had been under Spain. By formally regulating and controlling ecclesiastical appointments, the Philippine state addressed the long-standing issue of ecclesiastical secularization (the transfer of parishes from the regular clergy to the secular clergy) that pitted Spanish friars against Filipino diocesan priests, spurring the nationalist movement in the mid-nineteenth century. In effect, the Aguinaldo government assumed the functions of patronage to ensure the fulfillment of nationalist aspirations. Nevertheless, the status of Catholicism in the new nation-state was debated by Filipino laity and clergy even beyond the center of the revolution. Filipino clergy, for their part, almost unanimously rejected government oversight of ecclesiastical affairs despite demanding church-state union and continued government support. Ecclesiastical affairs in this period were in a constant state of flux, negotiation, and dialogue, underscoring the complex and contested legacy of patronage after Spanish rule.

In forwarding this argument, I highlight the centrality of the Patronato as a framework to understand the conflicts that arose between church and state in the Philippine Revolution against Spain. It is worth noting that the issue of whether ecclesiastical patronage subsisted in political sovereignty or was a Papal concession was debated in post-revolutionary Latin American nation-states. ² The Spanish Patronato, just as Spain became a global empire, gradually developed from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries in a series of concordats with the Holy See and laws that were later compiled in the Recopilación de los Leyes de los Reinos de las Indias (Compilation of the Laws of the Kingdoms of the Indies). The Recopilación (Tomo I, Libro I, Título 6: De Patronazgo Real de Indias) defined the powers of the monarch or his delegates (governors and administrators) vis-à-vis the church, most important of which were the presentation of candidates for ecclesiastical positions and oversight of church revenues and properties. ³ Similarly, concordats between the new Latin American republics and the Holy See in the nineteenth century formalized ecclesiastical patronage, with the Pope granting to the president of each republic a special privilege to present candidates for bishoprics and other major ecclesiastical positions. In exchange, the republics were to provide recognition and protection of the Roman Catholic Church as the established church. ⁴ The Aguinaldo government in the late nineteenth century, the product of the last revolution against imperial Spain, faced these same questions and dilemmas like its Latin American predecessors, and for a short while even exercising control of church appointments and properties within the very framework of what it called Patronato Eclesiástico (Ecclesiastical Patronage). ⁵

Ecclesiastical patronage is situated in this article within the broader concept of secularism to mean “the set of cultural and political systems that demarcate and govern religion—or, in other words, the systematic ordering of knowledge and power that puts religion in its place.” ⁶ This definition, of course, does not disprove the common conception of secularism as a separation of the religious and the profane that is aimed towards a more tolerant society. ⁷ However, it is crucially important to see secularism as first and foremost a normative regime of state power over religion. ⁸ Secularism induces questions, debates, and controversies over the nature of what is (or is not) religion and the extent which the spheres of the religious and the secular could occupy. In this sense, I argue that the Patronato was an archaic form of secularism since it essentially gave the state power to determine religious policy. Political scientist David Buckley uses the “stalemate” in the Malolos Congress (discussed below) and the subsequent imposition of church-state separation under Filipino and American rule as a foil to his theory of “benevolent secularism,” noting that Filipino revolutionaries in 1898 were mostly anticlerical and therefore the kind of secularism that emerged in the transimperial period was “hostile.” This was supposedly not the case in the 1935 Commonwealth Constitution when anticlerical tendencies were not decisive in enshrining church-state separation. ⁹ Passing over a great many historical conditions and imposing a rather rigid differentiation of what was true or untrue secularism, Buckley misses the crucial point that secularism was a function of state power, a power that was present in all periods of Philippine history.

To push this idea even further, especially in the context of the Philippine Revolution, secularism qua statist power intersected with secularization, that is, the ecclesiastical process of turning over parishes from the regular clergy (belonging to religious orders) to the secular clergy (priests who primarily belonged to a diocese or any defined ecclesiastical territory). Ecclesiastical secularization was the main concern of the Spanish colonial church in the Philippines in the mid-nineteenth century, related to the indigenization of the church by encouraging the formation of the native clergy. However, colonial policy did not give creole and native secular priests equal rights to parishes in an effort to diminish insurgency and sedition as it had happened in Mexico, where the criollo priest Miguel Hidalgo instigated the revolution in the 1810s. Peninsular members of the friar orders (Dominicans, Augustinians, Augustinian Recollects, and Franciscans) were preferred by the government to be at the helm of the parishes; no natives were admitted to these orders. The policy became a source of bitter resentment on the part of the secular clergy, climaxing in the execution of three secular priests in 1872, the event that laid the foundation of the nationalist movement in the late nineteenth century. ¹⁰ The anti-friar tendency which permeated the Philippine Revolution was the result of this ferment. ¹¹ What should be clear at this point is that ecclesiastical secularization was curtailed, and at times even mandated, by the state in the context of the Patronato. ¹² Ecclesiastical secularization, in other words, was the function of secularism. As will be demonstrated in the following sections, the Aguinaldo government in the late nineteenth century exercised its power to regulate and control ecclesiastical appointments, a power that was contested by the very people that such a policy sought to placate.

Given all these ideas, this article disputes the lingering assumption in Philippine historiography that the revolution completely evacuated Catholicism from state affairs. The divisive debate on church-state separation in the Malolos Congress, for instance, has been considered by historians like Teodoro Agoncillo and Onofre Corpuz as proof that the revolution sought a complete disentanglement of church and state. ¹³ This assertion conveniently assumes that that which was forged in the crucible of revolution inherently and automatically assumed the trappings of the modern, secular nation-state. However, this assertion is ahistorical, since evidence from the Philippine Insurgent Records (PIR) to which Agoncillo himself had access, completely showing the opposite trend: instead of a supposed “secular” state that did not want to have anything to do with religion, the documents reveal the constant desire of the Aguinaldo government to control ecclesiastical affairs. Most recently, the Southeast Asianist John T. Sidel turns to the “Culture War” of European anticlericalism and Freemasonry pitted against Ultramontane Catholicism to explain the cosmopolitan origins of the Philippine Revolution. ¹⁴ Despite mentioning the Patronato, Sidel’s analysis fails to see patronage as being part of the very fabric of the revolution he attempts to explain anew, even ignoring the issues raised by John Schumacher in Revolutionary Clergy (1981), which Sidel strangely cites only once. Worse, Sidel does not even consider the development of the idea of secularism in Europe, a secularism that subsumed the church within the sphere of the state, and the response of the “Ultramontane” church to such development, that is, disavowing state intrusion into the church. ¹⁵ Ultimately, the connection between the revolution and its supposed “background” which Sidel attempts to establish is very superficial.

Inversely, historians like John Schumacher and Cesar Majul have studied the religious policies of the Aguinaldo government, but they set aside the framework of patronage, arguing instead that such policies were mere expedient measures rather than actions that could be understood systematically. In his impressive study of the Filipino nationalist clergy, Schumacher surfaced the religious policies of the Aguinaldo government and demonstrated the fraught relations between revolutionary leaders and Filipino clerics, notably conflicts regarding church property, finances, and appointments. He is most successful in showing the “crises of conscience” that confronted the clergy, especially as the clergy realized that, contravening church teaching, the Philippine state desired to put the church under its control. ¹⁶ However, Schumacher’s interpretation becomes indeterminate because of his insistence on revolutionary expediency as the sole impetus for state policies, rather than a deeply entrenched political tradition that Filipino revolutionists have come to arrogate for themselves. To be fair, Schumacher mentioned the Patronato in his studies of the religious policies of the revolution, but he did not use this concept to systematically frame his evidence. ¹⁷ Furthermore, he reified the position of the Filipino clergy as an undisputed theological claim that completely disavowed state intrusion into ecclesiastical affairs (which was the norm under the Patronato), not mentioning nor problematizing that such a position was a recent development in Papal teaching first found in Pius IX’s “Syllabus of Errors” (1864). This assumption likewise undergirds the interpretation of the two Jesuit biographers of Gregorio Aglipay—Pedro de Achútegui and Miguel Bernad. ¹⁸ Tisa Wenger reinterprets the religious issues of the revolution in an attempt to argue for the fluctuating rhetoric of religious freedom. ¹⁹ However, the focus on religious freedom clouds the much more important and central issue of patronage, or what she labels in her work as religious establishment.

Majul, for his part, argued that the Aguinaldo government took concrete steps to establish a “national church” that addressed the desire to dismantle the influence and control of the Spanish clergy in the leadership of the Church, consequently putting Filipinos at the helm of church leadership. ²⁰ He added that “the formation of a Filipino Church was…a tool to further the aims of the Revolution” that “prevent[ed] an abrupt departure from the past.” ²¹ The idea of a “national church” has been recently rehashed by Peter Ben-Smit. ²² For comparison, Charles Keith uses the term “national church” to loosely describe the Catholic Church in Vietnam emerging from the colonial (imperial) and missionary period. ²³ However, the use of the term “national church” to explain the collective religious policies of the revolution is rather inaccurate since national churches are entities independent of Rome, similar to the Church of England. ²⁴ In some cases, these were churches related to ethnicities, such as the schismatic Polish National Catholic Church. ²⁵ The Catholic Church in Vietnam, in Keith’s own description, maintained allegiance to Rome. In the Philippines, revolutionists did not envision a schism from Rome: they all wanted the Holy See to sanction their control of the church through a concordat that would have established patronage. Majul’s insistence on the concept of a national church during the revolution was perhaps an anticipation of the layman Isabelo de los Reyes’s founding of the schismatic Iglesia Filipina Independiente (Philippine Independent Church [IFI]) in 1902, of which Aglipay became the first supreme bishop (obispo máximo), but this is an anachronism that pretends to provide a foundation to what Aglipay did after the revolution.

By focusing on the debates concerning the status of Catholicism in the nascent Philippine nation-state and the supposed right of the state to control ecclesiastical appointments, this article ultimately highlights the complex and contested legacies of church-state relations in the post-imperial Hispanic world.

II. Codifying Church and Nation-State

The status of Catholicism in the emergent nation-state was the subject of intense debate, especially in the Malolos Congress, inaugurated on 15 September 1898 at Barasoain church in Malolos, Bulacan that was then serving as the headquarters of the revolution. Intended as a representative legislative body, the first task of the Malolos Congress was the drafting of a constitution in which the most contentious provision was church-state separation. In this debate, Filipinos asked whether Catholicism was the basis of national unity, and consequently, if there was a need to make the Roman Catholic Church the established church. ²⁶ The debate, however, was just an incident to a much more important and definite goal: the need to officially establish the Philippine state’s patronage of the Catholic Church. Felipe Calderón, the lawyer who drafted the Malolos Constitution, explained that his adoption of church-state union was a preparation for the projected concordat with the Holy See that would regulate church-state relations in the Philippines and expedite the Filipinization of the Catholic hierarchy and the expropriation of the estates of the Spanish friars. ²⁷ As I have discussed in another article, the diplomacy of the Aguinaldo government gravitated toward this main goal. ²⁸ Apolinario Mabini, Calderón’s political enemy, had intended the same thing despite his anticlericalism and separationism. ²⁹ Mabini was a lawyer and philosopher who served as Aguinaldo’s close adviser, prime minister, foreign minister, and later chief justice; as will be discussed shortly, he intervened heavily in ecclesiastical affairs.

Felipe Calderón’s draft constitution proposed the establishment of Roman Catholicism as national identity and state religion while simultaneously providing for religious freedom on the private, individual level (Articles 5, 6, 7).The constitution was patterned after the constitutions of France, Belgium, Mexico, Brazil, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and Guatemala because these nations supposedly shared similar conditions to the Philippines, with Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and Guatemala establishing Roman Catholicism as the state church and signing concordats with the Holy See to formalize patronage. ³⁰ Almost immediately, Calderón’s proposal was opposed by some members of Congress who petitioned for an amendment of the provision on religion: “The state recognises the liberty and equality of all religions as well as the separation of the Church and State.” ³¹

Preceding Calderón, Apolinario Mabini penned his own draft constitution which, although declaring the separation of church and state, provided the state with as much power to regulate religion as if the Patronato had been established. Mabini’s draft was set aside in favor of Calderón’s. Inspired by republican and secular trends in Europe, Mabini introduced his vision for a state charter with a “True Decalogue” that contained his idea of a strong, all-encompassing nation-state which purported to be the basis of all human existence. ³² Mabini emphasized that the nation must be loved, second only to God and one’s honor, because it was solely through the nation that “you have life, love, and possessions; you achieve comfort, honor, and God.” For Mabini, individual lives, desires, bodily comforts, needs, and even religion were subsumed within the nation-state. ³³ Thus, when Mabini wrote that one was free to choose and practice a religion on the basis of one’s conscience, he was not making such statement as an ode to an individual choice to believe in God, for even conscience and religion were subject to the interests of the nation-state.

Mabini’s proposed religious policy in his draft constitution articulated the overreaching power of the nation-state as the basis of all human existence and endeavor, especially in the practice of religion. Article 12 declared that the Philippine Republic, as a society (Katipunan) of individual persons, did not profess any religion but that individual conscience should be the basis of one’s religious choice. But having privatized religion, the article further provided that “no public manifestation of religion shall be permitted without the express permission of the authorities.” ³⁴ While private reason and conscience were the domains of religion, the public exercise of that conscience and reason, according to the logic of Mabini’s proposal, was under the sovereign power of the state. Article 14, the projected Bill of Rights, went so far as to proscribe the existence and residence in the Philippines of religious orders that had superiors in Rome, leaving only in the archipelago those priests who directly answered to the local bishop. This provision not only localized the hierarchy but had inexorably presumed that ecclesiastical authority was subject to the authority of government. ³⁵ As a true secularist, therefore, Mabini envisioned not the disappearance of religion from public life but the state’s total and complete control of it. In this sense, Mabini was not different from Calderón.

The debate on church-state separation in the Malolos Constitution, which began on 22 November 1898, heavily focused on the utility of a Catholic nation-state in unifying the country in a time of revolution. ³⁶ On the one hand, although affirming that Christianity was the best among all the religions of the world, opponents of church-state union made their case with the argument from the history of religious intolerance and persecution. ³⁷ Separationists argued that within the structure of religious unity, the power of the Papacy was ingested (se ingiere) within civil power, making it thus vulnerable to state intrusion. They claimed that paradoxically, Catholicism was flourishing in the secular United States, unlike Catholic Spain that had the Patronato in place. ³⁸ Noting the presence of the Muslim population in the southern part of the archipelago, separationists contended that adopting a state religion would inevitably lead to civil war. Roman Catholicism, they concluded, cannot be the principle of national unity, given that the kind of Catholicism in the Philippines was a product of “theocratic feudalism” (feudalismo teocrático). ³⁹ On the other hand, Calderón argued for church-state union, arguing emphatically that the dissolution of religious unity was the disintegration of the nation. ⁴⁰ He defended his draft by arguing that in a country separated by geography and a multiplicity of tongues, Catholicism was “the only bond which connected the Tagalog with the Visayan, the Cagayan with the Bicol, was religion.” ⁴¹ He furthermore argued that the constitutions of other nations, such as Greece, Prussia, Russia, Guatemala, Denmark, England, and Costa Rica, proved that church-state union was not a sign of civilizational regression but was the norm even in the most progressive of nations. ⁴²

Nevertheless, while differing in their views on the Catholic Church’s place in public life and national identity, both sides of the debate implicitly agreed that religion was the state’s responsibility. The debate in Malolos was divisive not only because of contending visions of the national community ⁴³ but also because of the contending visions of how the state was to control the church. On 29 November 1899, the delegates of Congress voted in favor of separation, with a tie broken by a mere one vote. ⁴⁴ Article 5 of the Malolos Constitution formally instituted the separation of church and state.

It was paramount for the advocates of religious unity to sustain the argument that the basis of national unity was a common Catholicity, an idea known as Integralism. Integralism assumed that the foundation of political and social ordering was Catholic doctrine, and therefore, Catholicism could also accommodate nationalism and patriotism, as was the case of tradicionalismo in Spain. ⁴⁵ Filipino priests were able to support for the Philippine Revolution not because they were liberals but because they were nationalists. ⁴⁶ Writing for the revolutionary paper La Unión published in Nueva Cáceres (now Naga City), Padre Flaviano Inciso argued that national progress depended on aspiring to excel (mag̃naghig̃noa nin mag̃na marahay na pangauégaué) in the service of God (pagsirve sa Dios), interpersonal relations (pagpaquicapua tauo), and self-care (pagpag̃nataman ta satuyá man sana), in addition to excelling in agriculture, industry, and commerce (sa mag̃na pananom, sa mag̃na pag-industria, asin sa mag̃na pagnegocio). ⁴⁷ Padre Mariano Villafuerte, the parish priest of the cathedral of Nueva Cáceres, argued that since God was “the Sovereign and Supreme author of Society,” worship of him ought to be public and therefore protected by the state. In the context of the Philippines, this was the Catholic religion, which Villafuerte called the “one true religion.” ⁴⁸ In his debut article as El Creyente (The Believer) in the newspaper La República Filipina, Padre Manuel E. Roxas, the Aguinaldo government’s director of worship, depicted Filipinos as fervent Catholics and argued that the imposition of religious liberty was inapplicable to the Philippines. ⁴⁹ One anonymous columnist, for his part, even declared that “without faith there is no society, because without a common symbol of religious, moral, and political creeds, neither could unity be possible.” ⁵⁰

Advocates of religious unity also showcased the antiquity of Catholicism as proof of its durability and intertwining with Filipino identity. In a nation like the Philippines, with a Catholic majority, commentators encouraged the preservation of the beliefs and maxims that govern the “Christian customs” (cristianas costumbres) of the Filipino nation, adding that it was “fair…that this Nation or State should adopt as its own the religion of all Filipinos.” ⁵¹ Others appealed directly to antiquity, arguing that Catholicism was the “legacy of our forebears” ([herencia] de nuestros antepasados). ⁵² In his address to the delegates of the Malolos Congress, Padre Adriano Garcés of Dagupan insisted that the Filipinos were “very Catholic[,] which is the emblem of its race” (distintivo de su raza) and were willing to sacrifice to preserve and defend “that Religion inherited from their forebears” (esa Religión heredada de sus padres). ⁵³ Edited by Felipe Calderón and Padre Mariano Sevilla, the periodical El Católico Filipino opined that Catholicism, having taken root in the Philippines, was “the religion of our ancestors, that which made our mothers honorable and made us and our children dignified citizens.” ⁵⁴ In its protest against church-state separation, the Filipino clergy collectively reminded Aguinaldo that the time-tested customs of the Catholic Church were the solid foundations of a lasting unity for the Filipino Republic: “that which could save a Nation…are the feelings engraved upon the heart by the passing of time through the influence of strong institutions, by the antiquity of its habits and customs; it is unity in religious thinking which makes the people one body. ⁵⁵ Catholicism for integralists was not simply an identity to be discarded but an indelible facet of Filipino national life, an inherited legacy independent from the change of political regimes. In a society rent by disunity, the church became the constant and unchanging referent given its “divine and universal” mission for the salvation of souls, a mission that transcended race and nationality. ⁵⁶

The argument for unity, however, did not convince the laity as it did the clergy. On 7 November 1898, the Comité Popular of Quiapo, Manila, passed a resolution arguing that the state need not protect a particular religion (religión determinada). ⁵⁷ Looking at examples from other nations, columnists against religious unity pointed out how the secular United States enabled the flourishing of Roman Catholicism. ⁵⁸ Debating Padre Villafuerte, the layman Francisco Álvarez wrote in La Unión that prohibiting religious freedom was a sign of civilizational regression: if more prosperous countries had religious freedom, why cannot the Philippines have it? ⁵⁹ In a series of articles, the anonymous columnist Ambut (Visayan for the expression “Whatever”) refuted the arguments of El Creyente by asserting that religious liberty was an inherent right that the state ought to protect; protecting one religion meant bestowing the clergy with immense political power. ⁶⁰ Ambut argued that “the flourishing of our most holy religion owes itself to the separation of the Church from public power in the first centuries of Christianity.” ⁶¹ Declaring himself a Catholic, Ambut attacked the proposition that Catholicism was the basis of national unity by noting that the kind of Catholicism in the Philippines was a “contorted admixture of good and bad desires, and a shapeless hodgepodge of dogmas and superstitions, like the anting-anting and other sorcery.” ⁶² By presenting these observations, Ambut called into question the authenticity of Filipino Catholicism: for him, the basis of unity which the clergy wanted to imagine as “good religion,” was not good at all. ⁶³

It must be noted, however, that church-state union for the Filipino clergy did not mean that the church was subject to the control of the state. Basing their arguments on the doctrine of “two perfect societies,” Filipino priests maintained that the church ought to be free to regulate itself without the intrusion of civil officials. In the nineteenth century, Rome’s teachings on the secular state began to change: faced with the challenges of the German Kulturkampf, the Italian and Questione Romana, French laïcité, and regalism in Bourbon Spain, the Holy See emphasized the “two perfect societies” of church and state in Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical Immortale Dei (1885). Leo argued that the church was a societas perfecta (perfect society) entitled to have a separate corporate, juridical existence and thereby have the right to possess property and direct its internal policies unencumbered by the state. The state, also a perfect society, was entitled to the free exercise of its own prerogatives for the advancement of the common good. ⁶⁴ The doctrinal developments of the nineteenth-century Catholic Church, therefore, was a repudiation of the Patronato that gave the state extensive rights over ecclesiastical appointments and properties, indeed the exercise of the state’s secular power. ⁶⁵ In fact, Pope Pius IX, the Pontiff who preceded Leo XIII, had already condemned in his Syllabus of Errors the idea that the state had inherent rights to oversee ecclesiastical appointments through government exequatur, adding that the idea that the church was not entitled to a separate corporate existence with the concomitant rights to acquire property was downright iniquitous. ⁶⁶

Oceans away in the Philippines, this Papal intellectual ferment enabled Filipino priests to assert the independence of the church from the control of the Aguinaldo government. Filipino patriot Padre Agustín de la Peña, the Filipino curate of Dumangas, Iloilo and the appointed ecclesiastical governor of the Diocese of Jaro who later in 1900 died after enduring torture by US soldiers, penned a long epistle on church and state as a response to a decree from the Estado Federal de Bisayas (Federal State of the Visayas) that levied taxes on the performance of sacraments. ⁶⁷ Peña argued intensely that the church was a “perfect society” (sociedad perfecta) entitled to the free and independent exercise of its rights guaranteed by Christ himself. Drawing attention to examples from other “civilized” nations, Peña argued that Catholic governments had always respected the independence of the church. ⁶⁸ Echoing Papal teaching, he averred that “civil and ecclesiastical authorities should be mutually independent, each in its own sphere, that they may provide support for each other in the better realization of their specific goals. This harmony is advantageous to both [authorities], necessary for subjects who are members of each society.” ⁶⁹ Padre Pablo Singzón, the Filipino ecclesiastical governor of the Diocese of Cebú who in 1910 became the bishop of Calbayog in Samar, likewise invoked the idea of a qualified religious unity. In his circular of 17 May 1899 addressed to the priests of Cebú, Singzón condemned the interpretation of patronage by Malolos officials as “interference” into ecclesiastical authority. He accused government functionaries of seizing his correspondence and subjecting him to surveillance, thereby impeding him in the exercise of his duties as a churchman. ⁷⁰ In his admonition of Aguinaldo, Padre Lupo Carpio of Porac, Pampanga, wrote thus:

We owe obedience to temporal authority, and we have always manifested such obedience in those concerns which were within its sphere of competence. It is, after all, a duty of conscience; but it is equally obligatory for us to obey that which our spiritual chief commands of us, according to his spiritual authority, according to what ecclesiastical law requires of us, that same law or legislation which I suppose your government surely does not propose to oppose nor modify. ⁷¹

Nevertheless, the response of the Aguinaldo government to all these debates and contentions was to hold on to its power over the church. The Malolos Constitution was promulgated on 21 January 1899. The Philippine Republic meanwhile was inaugurated on 23 January with Aguinaldo as its president. Although a separationist, Mabini’s first act as cabinet president (a position he held until 4 May 1899) was to advise Aguinaldo, citing the utter divisiveness of the religious question, to postpone the enactment of the constitution’s fifth article until the independence of the republic had been recognized. ⁷² Aguinaldo in his message of 1 January 1899, drafted by Mabini, suspended the separation of church and state, mandated the continued financial support of parish priests by the municipality, and ordered the expulsion of all Spanish friars, including the remaining Spanish bishops. ⁷³ These orders found their way in the final form of the constitution, crystallized in Article 100. By leaving the religious situation in statu quo ante, Mabini and Aguinaldo set the conditions for the continuity of ecclesiastical patronage in the new republic. ⁷⁴

III. Controlling Ecclesiastical Appointments

With the Patronato in mind, the Aguinaldo government sought to exercise the right to present candidates for ecclesiastical positions. ⁷⁵ The Patronato concession that gave civil authority the power to present candidates for ecclesiastical positions is a quintessential exercise of secularism, giving the state the right to shape the church’s internal policies. Nevertheless, as it was under the Spanish Patronato, such state power was highly contested and debated in the First Philippine Republic. Following Spanish practice, the government regulated ecclesiastical appointments through the Justice Department (Ministerio de Gracia y Justicia), whose secretary in 1898 was Gregorio Araneta. Direct supervision of these appointments, meanwhile, was the duty of the Dirección de Cúltos (Bureau of Worship), a section within the Justice Department, with Padre Manuel E. Roxas, a licenciado in canon law, as its director. ⁷⁶ Documentation of this period also shows that supervision of church matters oscillated between the Justice Department and the Interior Department whose secretary in 1898 was Leandro Ibarra.

The presentation of candidates as defined by the Recopilación was the defining feature of Spanish patronage. ⁷⁷ It was the responsibility of the Council of the Indies (later the Ministerio de Ultramar) to draw up a terna (list of three candidates) for vacant bishoprics, from which the Sovereign chose one to be presented to the Holy See for canonical confirmation, consecration, and installation. ⁷⁸ The appointment of parish priests followed the same process in the inverse. Once a vacancy arose, candidates were subjected to a competitive exam called the concursus, at the end of which the bishop created a terna from which the governor-general, as the vice royal patron, selected one for a canonical appointment. ⁷⁹ For parishes run by religious orders, the selection process was usually undertaken not by the bishop but by the order’s provincial superior, who selected from among his own confreres candidates for vacancies (thus, disqualifying other candidates, i.e., the secular clergy). The provincial then presented a terna to the vice royal patron, who chose one to be presented to the bishop for canonical confirmation. ⁸⁰ This special process for the religious parish priests made them immune to episcopal authority, one of the issues that sparked the secularization controversy of the mid-nineteenth century. Parish priests had tenure (amovilidad) and “owned” the parish or benefice as proprietary curates (cura proprietario). ⁸¹

In the late nineteenth century, the Aguinaldo government seized control of this process. On 20 October 1898, Aguinaldo issued a decree declaring that no Filipino priest appointed by the Spanish archbishop of Manila, the Dominican friar Bernardino Nozaleda, could be recognized without having obtained authorization from government. Aguinaldo cited his suspicions of priests who continued to subject themselves to the authority of Nozaleda as his primary motivation. ⁸² Aguinaldo firmly reiterated this injunction in a short circular dated 3 November 1898 in which he vowed to punish Filipino priests who continued to follow the orders of Nozaleda, considering them guilty of espionage against the government. ⁸³

Aguinaldo’s decree and circular were the foundations of the policy that authorized the canonical appointments of parish priests, a policy that was defined, refined, executed, and managed by the Justice Department and the Worship Bureau in 1898. Variably, the term confirmation (confirmar) was also used in lieu of “authorize,” bearing the same idea that the government gave approval to an appointment made by an ecclesiastical authority. In canonical terms, this process was known as exequatur or the regium placet, the mechanism by which civil authority enacted and executed papal bulls, decrees, mandates, and most especially recognized ecclesiastical appointments. In this policy, the revolutionary government had very little intervention in the actual process of selecting a candidate, although hypothetically it could refuse approbation and therefore incapacitate the priest in the exercise of his duties. ⁸⁴ Nevertheless, as will be remembered, exequatur had already been condemned by the Pius IX in the Syllabus of Errors.

Secretary Araneta and Padre Roxas implicitly conceded that the Aguinaldo government succeeded in the exercise of patronage, but with limited powers unlike the Spanish vice royal patron. The generic answer to requests for authorization often enjoined the applicant “to satisfy” (reúnar) the canonical conditions required for the appointment, showing that Roxas and Araneta relied heavily on the strength of ecclesiastical rather than civil jurisdiction. In effect, despite their hostility against the friars, the Aguinaldo government de facto recognized the authority of Archbishop Nozaleda. ⁸⁵ Before the 20 October decree, Aguinaldo himself approved requests for authorization, but eventually a more uniform process within the Justice Department emerged: requests from priests were received and were then approved by the Justice Secretary, with the decision endorsed to local government officials. ⁸⁶ Vicars forane appointed by the Spanish bishops were recognized by government without difficulty using this system. ⁸⁷ Appointments of Filipino priests who were delegated (encargado) by Spanish curas propietarios who either fled or were captured by revolutionary forces were likewise swiftly approved in the same manner. ⁸⁸

Central and local government, however, diverged in the manner of appointing parish priests since municipal presidentes (mayors) and the juntas populares (municipal councils) often intervened in the parishes by asking priests from the government, rather than the bishops. ⁸⁹ In some instances, Filipino priests themselves colluded with local officials to acquire important and lucrative parishes abandoned by the Spanish friars. ⁹⁰ Most of these requests were turned down, with the exception of requests for confirmation sent by provincial governors on behalf of priests who already possessed canonical appointments from the archbishop. ⁹¹ The clergy in the province of Nueva Ecija, for instance, was enjoined by the provincial governor to elect a leader that effectively took the place of the Spanish bishop, but the said election was only approved by Leandro Ibarra, the Interior Secretary, on the condition that it did not “touch upon ecclesiastical jurisdiction.” ⁹² Such “intrusions” of local governments continued under American rule, especially with the seizure of church buildings by municipalities on behalf of the IFI, consistent as this pattern of behavior was with the prevailing notion amongst Filipino politicians that civil authority had the right to regulate ecclesiastical affairs.

The contradiction to the prevailing government ecclesiastical policy was introduced by no less than Aguinaldo himself. On 20 October 1898, the same day that he issued his exequatur decree, Aguinaldo appointed Padre Gregorio Aglipay as vicario general castrense (military vicar general). The appointment of Aglipay effectively established a conflicting ecclesiastical policy within the same government, ordered by the same person, and handed down on the same day. Aglipay had earlier served as military chaplain (capellan castrense) of Aguinaldo’s army, interpreting his position as capellan as endowing him “with the full powers to deal with the Filipino clergy.” ⁹³ Following this logic, his appointment as military vicar general was a promotion to greater ecclesiastical authority and jurisdiction. ⁹⁴ Aguinaldo’s actual decree is scant in detail as to what a military vicar general exactly was, so Aglipay filled in the lacuna when he issued three manifestos as military vicar general. ⁹⁵

In his first manifesto dated 21 October 1898, Aglipay noted that the political emancipation of the Filipino people from Spanish authority was their liberation from the authority of the Spanish bishops. Drafted by Mabini, this first manifesto proposed the establishment of ecclesiastical patronage in three steps: first, the rejection of the authority of the Spanish friar bishops; second, the establishment of a provisional authority that proceeded from Aglipay with the blessing of government; and third, the commencement of diplomatic relations between the Aguinaldo government and the Holy See. ⁹⁶ These proposals emboldened Aguinaldo in asserting the powers of patronage through Aglipay’s ministrations.

Aglipay’s declarations, however, surfaced the lingering dilemma of the Filipino clergy: to reject the authority of the Spanish bishops was to incur ecclesiastical censure and dally in schism, while doing the contrary was to incite the suspicion of government. ⁹⁷ In an editorial, Roxas asked: “what ought the Filipino clergy do in this battle between two authorities?” ⁹⁸ While recapitulating the discrimination harbored against the native clergy by the Spanish friars, Roxas debunked the idea that in obeying the Spanish bishops, Filipino priests were opposing the revolution. ⁹⁹ Aglipay’s partisans, however, argued that with the Spanish friars incessantly slandering them, the Filipino clergy must unite under the “not-well-enough praised…Señor Aglipay” who, in his first manifesto, commanded the creation of a council to take over the authority of the Spanish bishops. They added that if the Pope continued to defend the Spanish friars, “we [Filipino Catholics] shall be forced into an anomalous situation which is consequently against the interests of Catholicism, a thing which we all ought to prevent by all means possible.” ¹⁰⁰

The parallel policy instigated by Aguinaldo and given shape by Aglipay and Mabini did not see full realization until the following year, in October 1899, at the Paniqui Assembly in Tarlac province. Surprisingly, perhaps to allay the suspicions of his fellow clerics, Aglipay issued a manifesto dated 28 October 1898 where, contravening his earlier statements, he warned the government not to interfere with ecclesiastical jurisdiction; that while cooperation and harmony must exist between ecclesiastical and civil powers, “all initiative in ecclesiastical matters must come not from the Philippine Government but from the clergy.” ¹⁰¹ Aglipay warned that “the Cleric who neither with the consent nor the mandate of the Holy See subjected himself to civil power, is acting against the sacred canons and induces ecclesiastical irregularity.” ¹⁰² This manifesto insisted that the Patronato of the Aguinaldo government must be sanctioned by the Holy See, thereby shelving the Aglipay-Mabini project of rejecting the authority of the Spanish hierarchy and reorienting Aguinaldo back to the Araneta-Roxas policy of exequatur. An exasperated Mabini, the mastermind behind Aglipay’s earlier manifesto, complained that “it is true that our priests recognize the authority of Nozaleda. I have convinced them that they should demand from the Roman Pontiff that Filipino bishops should be appointed. I do not know I have convinced them, for they are very stubborn.” ¹⁰³

During this one-year period until the Paniqui Assembly on 23 October 1899, Aglipay was in Vigan where he put into effect, albeit on a smaller scale, the end goal of his manifestos in Malolos: being head of the church under the patronage of the Aguinaldo government. Up in Northern Luzon, away from the center of political power in Malolos, Aglipay was ecclesiastical governor of Nueva Segovia, a position that he held concurrently as the government’s military vicar general. A native of Batac, Ilocos Norte, he was appointed ecclesiastical governor of Nueva Segovia on 15 December 1898 by Fray José Hevia de Campomanes, the Dominican bishop of the diocese, held hostage by Filipino revolutionists. ¹⁰⁴ From the episcopal city of Vigan, Ilocos Sur, Aglipay released patriotic circulars which oriented the clergy towards the cause of the revolution, encouraging them to financially contribute to the war effort. ¹⁰⁵ The significance of Aglipay’s circulars as ecclesiastical governor of Nueva Segovia, however, lay not in the patriotism but in his project of concentrating power in himself; although he was loyal to the Aguinaldo government and its patronage, he insisted on the strict adherence to the ecclesiastical chain of command with him as its leader. Such was the case when he proscribed priests from conniving with government officials to secure appointments, encouraged the clergy to defend stole fees, and even provided an order of succession should he die or be captured. ¹⁰⁶

IV. Regional Variations

Since the influence of the revolution was mostly strong in the Tagalog Region and Northern Luzon, the Aguinaldo government’s exequatur policy mostly dealt with appointments in the parishes that comprised the Archdiocese of Manila and Aglipay’s bailiwick, the Diocese of Nueva Segovia. In 1898, the Philippines comprised five dioceses: the metropolitan Archdiocese of Manila (Tagalog Region and Central Luzon), the suffragan Dioceses of Nueva Segovia (Northern Luzon and Batanes), Nueva Cáceres (the Bicol provinces and Tayabas), Cebú (the islands of Cebú, Samar, Leyte, Guam, and a part of Mindanao), and Jaro (Panay, Negros, and a part of Mindanao). As may be surmised from the geography and considering the archipelagic variations in the prosecution of the revolution, the ecclesiastical policies of the Aguinaldo government were not observed uniformly across the archipelago. ¹⁰⁷ In the supposed 1899 general list of parish priests who sought authorization from the Philippine Republic, for example, a mere 17 provinces and 80 parishes were represented. Of these 17 provinces, 11 belonged to the Archdiocese of Manila (Bulacan, Laguna, Batangas, Bataan, Marinduque, Zambales, Manila, Mindoro, Cavite, Morong, Nueva Ecija), three to the Diocese of Nueva Segovia (Unión, Pangasinan, Tarlac), and three to the Diocese of Nueva Cáceres (Sorsogón, Tayabas, Ambos Camarines). ¹⁰⁸

In the Diocese of Jaro, the Augustinian Recollect friar Andrés Ferrero delegated his powers to Padre Agustín de la Peña who resisted government interference in the affairs of the church. Ferrero appointed Peña as ecclesiastical governor sede plena since the outbreak of the revolution impeded him from taking possession of his diocese and leaving him confined to Manila. ¹⁰⁹ Ferrero was suspicious of Filipino priests whom he said were “obeying the leaders of the insurrection more than their legitimate bishop.” ¹¹⁰ Nevertheless, Ferrero entrusted the care of the diocese to Peña. On 14 January 1899, the Estado Federal de Bisayas, as with Malolos, required government approval of parish priests, the payment of the curate’s salaries by the municipality, and the protection of their right to stole fees. ¹¹¹ In a letter from Manila, Ferrero reminded the clergy of Jaro that the nomination and installation (institución) of parish priests pertained solely to church authority, disputing the argument that the Philippine Republic succeeded in ecclesiastical patronage. Ferrero averred that the Patronato had now been abolished with the fall of Spain and therefore Filipino civil officials had no right to present candidates for ecclesiastical benefices. ¹¹²

Padre Peña accordingly defined his “course of action” (linea de conducta) as such: “strictly complying with the sacred duties of our holy ministry, without meddling in political concerns which add nothing to piety.” ¹¹³ Reiterating Ferrero’s advice, Peña admonished his fellow priests not to seek assistance from civil authorities in acquiring lucrative parishes. ¹¹⁴ Throughout his tenure as ecclesiastical governor, Peña asserted that he alone, as the representative of the bishop, was responsible for ecclesiastical appointments. ¹¹⁵ For example, Peña reprimanded the municipal presidente of León, Iloilo for instigating a petition to remove the town’s Filipino parish priest, Padre Gervacio Gallofín. ¹¹⁶ The petition accused Gallofín of engaging in commercial transactions, exacting excessive stole fees, refusing to hear confessions, keeping a concubine in the rectory, and, most gravely, raping young girls. ¹¹⁷ Peña retaliated against the presidente by suspending religious services in León. Meanwhile, Demetrio Larena, the presidente of Dumaguete, requested from Peña the appointment of an interim curate for the town parish. Peña could not send someone at the time of the request on account of scarcity but asked Larena for assurances that with the priest having been supplied, his salary and stole fees were to be assured and protected by the municipality. ¹¹⁸ In 1903, the embattled Gallofín was listed as the curate of Dumaguete. ¹¹⁹

The ecclesiastical situation in the Dioceses of Nueva Cáceres and Cebú, meanwhile, was far more regular, although such a state was disturbed once anticlerical officials from the Malolos government took over these areas. The Augustinian bishop Arsenio Campo Monasterio, before fleeing to Spain sometime in early 1898, had appointed his confrere, the Spanish Fray Román González, as ecclesiastical governor of Nueva Cáceres. ¹²⁰ The end of Spanish rule in Albay and Sorsogón provinces was not violent, with the Spanish colonies of each province simply leaving their locales inconspicuously. ¹²¹ Leading Filipino priests in both provinces, such as Victorino Peña in Albay and Jorge Barlín in Sorsogón, were initially tapped to take the reins of civil government. Peña refused the offer, while Barlín relinquished his interim role as provincial governor when Malolos officials took over Sorsogón. ¹²² Barlín was later appointed in 1905 as the first native Filipino bishop. In the city of Nueva Cáceres in Ambos Camarines, which was the seat of the diocese, Spanish rule was violently ended by a battle that erupted on 18 September 1898. The Spanish colony, together with nuns and ecclesiastics, surrendered on 19 September 1898. ¹²³

Generally, there was no anti-friar sentiment in the city of Nueva Cáceres, but the arrival of Vicente Lucban changed the situation. Lucban was the professed anticleric and Freemason who assumed the post of military commander of Ambos Camarines. ¹²⁴ Forcefully exercising patronage, Lucban urged Román Gonzalez to relinquish his post in favor of a Filipino priest, named Rafael Priego, whom Lucban had chosen as Gonzaléz’s replacement. Lucban’s command was immediately refused by González. ¹²⁵ Frustrated in their initial attempt, Priego and Lucban maneuvered to wrest control of the diocese from González by sending a telegram to Bishop Campo in Spain: “Present circumstances oblige to have the Diocese entrusted to Don Rafael Priego and no other.” Receiving no response, Priego assumed that the bishop had acquiesced to the ruse. However, Priego was aware that his situation was irregular, so he formed a commission of five priests to confer with Archbishop Nozaleda in Manila on the issue of the ecclesiastical governor in Nueva Cáceres. The meeting with Nozaleda was a failure, for the priests were castigated by the archbishop in their attempt to bypass the authority of González. The priests then sought recourse (sacar gran partido) in Malolos where they attempted to obtain the appointment from Aguinaldo. This attempt backfired: they were reportedly received by Aguinaldo (el honorable) who met them in the waiting room (antesala) and scolded them “for they had presented themselves first to the archbishop before going to him.” One of the priests stayed behind in Malolos to confer with Aglipay, who appointed said priest as ecclesiastical governor of Nueva Cáceres and handed him one of the manifestos of October 1898. ¹²⁶ This appointment however was renounced by the priest, thus isolating Nueva Cáceres completely from the ecclesiastical policy of Aglipay and the Malolos government. ¹²⁷

Although the Spanish colony in Cebú departed on 24 December 1898, the diocese’s Franciscan bishop Martín García Alcocer chose to stay behind to intercede with incoming Filipino revolutionists to spare the city from destruction. After a conference with a delegation of Filipino priests, Filipino troops entered Cebú and maintained amicable relations with Bishop García. ¹²⁸ However, as Vicente Lucban took over the command Cebú, he again disturbed the situation by ordering the arrest of the bishop. This prompted García to escape incognito on 1 February 1899. ¹²⁹ Before doing so, García appointed the Filipino priest Pablo Singzón as ecclesiastical governor. The clergy of Cebú meanwhile protested Lucban’s harassment of Bishop García: a commission of four clerics was sent to Aguinaldo to seek the suspension of the bishop’s arrest. The commission arrived in Manila on 4 February 1899, but their mission was aborted by the outbreak of the Philippine-American War. ¹³⁰

Singzón had strenuous relations with Lucban, whom he had denounced bitterly to the Vatican. ¹³¹ After his stint in Cebú, Lucban transferred to Samar where he had forced the clergy to renounce their obedience to Padre Singzón. “With the concurrence of the provincial chief,” Lucban nominated parish priests and sent a circular to the municipal presidents ordering them not to recognize parish priests who defied government orders. As a punitive measure, he converted the rectories of defiant clergymen into coeducational schoolhouses. Having been forced under duress and threats of “gunpowder, cannons, guns” to approve these measures, the Filipino priests left Samar as a protest against Lucban, whom they all regarded as “a despot.” ¹³²

These jurisdictional conflicts in the provincial dioceses demonstrate the difficulties inherent in the system of patronage, a system whose principles and legacies were contested and debated. ¹³³ Further exacerbated by doctrinal developments in the nineteenth century which eschewed the Patronato, Filipino clerics were able to protect themselves from the encroachments of the secular state. As with Nueva Cáceres and Jaro, Cebú hardly acquiesced to civil officials’ idea of complete control of church appointments. All ecclesiastical leaders, including Aglipay in his capacity as ecclesiastical governor of Nueva Segovia, yearned for church-state unity, and presumably were disposed to the Patronato, but they were not ready to concede complete state control of the church.

With the suspension of church-state separation in the Malolos Constitution on 21 January 1899, the exequatur policy of Araneta and Roxas was still presumably intact, although both did not make it to the new cabinet formed by Mabini after the inauguration of the new government in January 1899. On 24 January 1899, three days after the promulgation of the Constitution, the new Interior Secretary Teodoro Sandiko approved and endorsed Archbishop Nozaleda’s appointment of Padre Francisco Ortíz as curate of the important parish of Sampaloc, Manila on 20 January 1899. ¹³⁴ In his decree, Sandiko reminded the municipal council that it was obliged to provide the salary of the priest. ¹³⁵

V. Final Attempts at a Cohesive Ecclesiastical Policy

The republic’s ecclesiastical policy, however, began to radically change with Aglipay’s excommunication, marking its final attempts towards a more cohesive ecclesiastical policy. Having been detailed in Vigan as ecclesiastical governor, Aglipay was summoned multiple times to the ecclesiastical court of Manila in the first quarter of 1899 to answer for the charges of usurping ecclesiastical jurisdiction and the publication of manifestos in October 1898. The court also wanted to question Aglipay regarding an open letter to Nozaleda where he sardonically advised the archbishop to desist from “teaching” Filipinos about the rudiments of canon law: Nozaleda held a doctorate in canon law. ¹³⁶ Aglipay ignored the summons and the decree of his excommunication was pronounced by the Manila ecclesiastical court on 29 April 1899, later promulgated on 4 May 1899. ¹³⁷ The court, headed by the dean of the Manila cathedral chapter (cabildo), Silvino López Tuñón, condemned Aglipay for usurping ecclesiastical jurisdiction by making ecclesiastical appointments as a military chaplain; and, as military vicar general, for denying the legitimacy of ecclesiastical authority, that is, the Spanish bishops. The decree of excommunication was printed and distributed widely, that even Padre Singzon down in Cebú was able to circulate it in full to the priests of his diocese. ¹³⁸ Nozaleda, meanwhile, informed the priests of Nueva Segovia about the excommunication which eventually led to Aglipay’s fall from power in those parts, as the clergy, including Bishop Hevia, were up to that point unaware of Aglipay’s infractions. ¹³⁹

Apolinario Mabini was the author of Aglipay’s defense against the excommunication, which took the form of a letter, addressed to the clergy and the faithful of the Philippines that argued for the rationality of Aglipay’s actions. Disputing the charge of jurisdictional usurpation, Mabini argued that with the fall of Spain also came the annulment of Spanish ecclesiastical power. The abnormal circumstances of the revolution had suspended the normal functioning of canon law, and with the absence of any competent church authority, Aglipay came in to fill the vacuum. The government, according to Mabini, did not appoint Aglipay but merely “recognized” him as a military vicar general. And because the entire nation was up in arms, Aglipay’s jurisdiction as a military vicar general encompassed the entirety of the Philippines. ¹⁴⁰ This position was supported by the government through a circular issued by the new Interior Secretary at the time of the excommunication, Severino de las Alas. ¹⁴¹ Mabini argued in the same way in his refusal to release the Spanish friars as prisoners of war, as I have discussed elsewhere. ¹⁴²

Mabini and Aglipay took things further by consummating the proposals laid out in the manifesto of 21 October 1898, with the idea of formalizing the ecclesiastical patronage of the Philippine Republic. Mabini penned a resolution convoking an assembly of the clergy to take control of the church in the Philippines. Such an assembly was based on the supposition that there existed no episcopal authority in the Philippines at the fall of Spain, and that the Filipino clergy, on behalf of government, needed to have direct communications with the Pope. ¹⁴³ This assembly took place in the rectory of Paniqui, Tarlac, on 23 October 1899. Attended by a mere 27 Filipino priests, majority of whom were from the Diocese of Nueva Segovia with a few from the Archdiocese of Manila, the assembly approved a provisional constitution of nine canons and three transitory provisions meant to regulate the Catholic Church in the Philippines during the period of revolution. ¹⁴⁴

Viewed more critically, however, the Paniqui Constitution was meant as the steppingstone in establishing ecclesiastical patronage with the official sanction of Rome. Conforming to Aglipay’s 21 October 1898 manifesto and Mabini’s 1899 resolutions, Canon 1 of the Paniqui Constitution declared that the Filipino clergy were to form a provisional organization meant to regulate the church in the Philippines in the duration of the war. Styling itself as the legitimate representation of the entire Filipino clergy and faithful, this organization was mandated to obtain from the Holy See the appointment of Filipino bishops to the dioceses of the Philippines. The validity of the constitution will be until such time, presumably after the war, when the Pope will have appointed Filipino bishops (Canon 6), and, mindful of the union of church and state, a concordat will have been drawn up between the Philippine Republic and the Holy See (Canon 9) regulating church-state relations in the new nation-state. A governing council (cabildo) was to be formed (Canon 2) of which Aglipay, as incumbent military vicar general, was the president, receiving the title of Superior Ecclesiastical Chief of the Philippines (Canon 7). Among other things, the council was tasked to be the official liaison between church and state, especially in the authorization of ecclesiastical appointments.

The Paniqui Constitution actualized the manifesto of 21 October 1898 a little more than a year after its release. Anticipating the signing of a concordat between the Philippine Republic and the Holy See, the provisional constitution projected the official establishment of the republic’s patronage of the church and not some “national church.” When Aglipay and Mabini spoke of the Iglesia filipina, they were not referring to a separate church independent from Rome: they were referring to the Roman, Catholic, Apostolic Church in the Philippine Islands under the authority of the Pope. However, with the outbreak of guerrilla warfare in the final months of 1899, the constitution took no effect. Just like Aglipay’s manifestos in 1898, the constitution was never recognized by the entire church in the Philippines. In fact, Aguinaldo in March 1900 had to issue a strongly worded decree ordering Filipino priests to recognize Aglipay as their head. ¹⁴⁵

VI. Conclusion

The Catholic Church continued under the control of the Philippine Republic, and whether that control was benevolent or not is beside the point. What is pertinent is that in crafting policies toward the church, the Aguinaldo government imagined a dispensation in which the church continued to exist, that ecclesiastical patronage continued as a fundamental need in an otherwise “secular” republic. Patronage, in this case, was the exercise of secularism, a legacy from the Spanish colonial past that was arrogated by the Aguinaldo government to itself but was resisted by the Filipino clergy which it intended to serve. The Philippine Revolution desired the elimination of all that was Spanish, including the friars, with the goal of supplanting them with Filipino clerics at the helm of religious leadership. The revolution was anti-friar, anti-Spanish, and could be considered to a certain extent, anticlerical, but it cannot be entirely true that it aimed at the total obliteration of the Catholic Church. The very existence of an ecclesiastical policy proves that even anticlerical forces within the republic envisioned the continuity of the Catholic Church within a system of patronage.

The idea of state control of the church later resonated with the American colonial regime that dismantled Aguinaldo’s republic. As I argue elsewhere, the US colonial state, even with its tradition of church-state separation, was not immune to the exercise of the powers of patronage to assert its sovereignty over a defiant population. ¹⁴⁶ Viewed in this way, American imperial secularism, as an exercise of state power, was not totally different from the secularism of Filipinos and Spaniards.