EXTRACT from: Peasant Resistance and Religious Protests in Early Philippine Society: Turning Friars against the Grain
Kathy Nadeau
As (Vicente)Rafael sees it, Filipinos and friars indigenized Christianity for purely economic and political reasons. The people or the Philippines looked at Christianity as a quid pro quo in terms of reciprocity and varying degrees of indebtedness (utang na loob) while the early friars used their role as priest '"To consolidate their position in the hierarchy of divine commerce"(p.98).
Rafael's interpretation of economic interest is like a capitalist that is individualist one. For him to be economic is to be interested in individual profit more than in the welfare of the community as a whole.
It is to promote one's status through a system of indebting others unto oneself. In a word this is "opportunism".
Such a definition does not fit precolonial Philippine economy. I slightly diverge from Rafael's contention that one of the key means used to control local workers was confession. According to his view, the priest used his role as father confessor to force his parishioners into debt and further dependence upon him. By such means, the local workers were further goaded into obeying their Spanish overlords.
While religious clergy undoubtedly served to domesticate a potentially unruly and landless labour force for Filipino and Spanish colonial officials (Troeltsch 1 931 : 138.220), a rather different interpretations of confession is given by de la Costa, namely that this sacrament was used more to oversee Spanish and Filipino encomenderos than the peasant labourers who worked for them (1961:33-35).
In fact, argues de la Costa, the early Spanish abuse of Filipino rights was so offensive to the Catholic clergy that Bishop Salazar called for a meeting of a Synod in Manila in 1581. Describing the times the Spanish bishop thundered that "il was absurd that a man of low degree, merely because he immigrates to the colonies, should acquire the prerogatives of a knight and lord of vassals, doing violence and a thousand injustices to the miserable native who is unable to stand his ground against the arrogance of the Spaniard and the tyranny of his own chiefdoms" (de la Costa 1961:33).
Under the new Synod directives, absentee encomenderos, in particular, were found guilty. Similarly, Spanish troops and other laymen who committed crimes against Filipinos were ordered to compensate their victims. The proceedings from this meeting were drawn up into a handbook for pries to use in the confessional to oversee the encomenderos and conquistadores. The directives, however, were not well received and many offenders simply stopped going to confession (de la Costa 1961:35).
Constantino (1975: 22. 77, 78) notes that some friars accused the "encomenderos" of "ex-orbitant exactions and other abuses: "some governors complained that the friars had "exploted and reduced the natives to virtual slavery. "But if Filipinos wished to report the misdeeds of their friars and overlords to civil authorities, they had to do so through the agency of another friar.
The system was corruptible. Only rare and outstanding clerics struggled against the grain for the civil rights of parishioners.
Until the latter part of the 19th century when select members of the Chinese meztizo and Filipino illustrado class were for the first lime admitted into the priesthood, the indigenous Indios could not represent themselves in Spanish courts because they could not enter the priesthood, and I emphasize again that this is in contrast to the Muslim and Buddhist development of indigenous religious elites.
The indigenous had little parliamentary recourse other than to allow a Spanish friar to represent them. Only the late Spanish period saw Filipino males ordained into the priesthood. The first Council of Mexico (1555) forbade Indios, mestizos and mulattoes to enter the priesthood because "they resembled the descendants of Moors and persons who had been sentenced by the Inquisition as lack ng in good repute which those who bear the sacerdotal character ought to have, "an indictment repeated in milder form at the second Council of Mexico in 1585 (see de la Costa 1961 :233-35).
While no doubt some Catholic clerics willingly allowed themselves to be used by prominent Filipinos and colonial officials, some spoke out against the widespread injustices brought by government, Church and landed aristocracy. These religious spokesmen persistently wrote and sermonized against the authorities of the Church and Crown as in 1768 when the Pope at the behest of the king ordered the Jesuits to return to Spain (de la Costa 196 1:486; Schumacher 1981).
Although some peasants grew attached to their priests through rituals such as processions and novenas to petition for rain or cures that aimed to rectify worldly wrongs through other-worldly ways, the localization of Christianity occurred in relation to precolonial Southeast Asian history in a process multisided and complex.
84 JOURNAL FOR THE SCENTIFIC STUDY OF RELIGION
On the one hand, many early missionaries taught a mystified and other-worldly version or Christianity to indoctrinate and subdue the masses for their conquerors. They misled Filipinos to redress through appeal to a higher and all-knowing God rather than to social and economic conditions stemming from the inequitable relationship between the imperialists and the colonized.
Both friars and collaborating local elites were accomplices in this coercive conversion that rested on tenets more of Hispanization than of Christianization (Phelan 1959:87 ; de la Costa 196 1:534; Rafael 1988).
However, the indigenous Filipinos interpreted Christianity in terms of traditional Southeast Asian cultural practices and beliefs. Many articulated the language of Christianity as a means for expressing their own values. ideals, and hopes for liberation from their colonial oppressors. In effect, Filipinos developed their own version or folk Catholicism to contest and eventually transform Spanish rule. This folk Catholicism was largely an indigenous resistance to Spanish Christian colonialism. Concomitantly select friars played a role in this Filipino resistance movement by shaping popular ideas and opinions opposing the prevailing social order (see Gramsci 1971:192-193). The resistance transpired simultaneously in relation to a parishioner and indigenous follower system in the history of Southeast Asia.
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