The Ideal and the Real in Filipino Lowland Life. Franciscan Descriptions of the Ways Filipinos

Actually Lived in the Eighteenth Century

Bruce Cruikshank©

19 February 2016

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Table of Contents

Introduction 3

The Ideal: Life in the Pueblo Centered on the Church 4

Sundays and Azotes 24

But Did Filipinos Attend to the Bells? 37

Arenas of Filipino Freedom from Mandated Behavior 48

Conclusions 63

Bibliography 70

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Introduction

We have difficulty finding and hearing Filipino1 voices in Philippine history. The manuscripts that come down to us overwhelmingly were written by Spaniards and other non-Filipinos. The foci of these manuscripts are almost always on administrative, political, economic, and religious matters dealing with Spaniards and Spanish rule in the archipelago. It is rare that we have documents composed by Filipinos. Even rarer are the references to the priorities and lives of the bulk of the Filipino population. Those historians committed to trying to find, listen, and learn about Filipinos lives, dreams, and accomplishments in the past are all too often frustrated by the limitations of the sources available to us.

In this essay I want to try to tease out a sense of Filipino lives in Franciscan-administered parishes in the eighteenth century by working with a portrait of parish life and discords. Whatever conclusions I am able to paint will necessarily be done with a broad brush, but perhaps the result will be of use as sort of a generic backdrop to the individual details of the lives of the undocumented in the colonial Philippines in this period, at least in the lowlands. My essay will try to be evocative with references to various manuscripts but with no verifiable way to establishing its validity over time and in every corner of the colony for most or even many Filipinos. Let’s call it an essay of exploration rather than a closely argued study tightly focused and anchored to multitudes of manuscript sources.

My intention is to begin with an overview of Franciscan expectations of pueblo life centered on the municipal church. We might characterize this as the ideal. From there I will move to what I term “shadows,” qualifications and deepening aspects that add a more three dimensional or realistic view of Filipinos and the pueblo church. At this point we should have managed to draw up a general and more realistic picture of Filipino life in the pueblos of the eighteenth-century Philippines.

1 I use the term Filipino to designate all Asians born in the areas under real or claimed Spanish rule. The usage is, of course, anachronistic. It is employed for convenience. The Spanish often used the term Indio for the majority of Filipinos, a term which I retain only when quoting directly from a manuscript or published source.

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The Ideal: Life in the Pueblo Centered on the Church

The pueblo or municipal district consisted of a central area, the población, centered around the church, plaza, government buildings, and homes of the more prominent families.2 Those who did not live in the población lived in settlements scattered within the territory of the pueblo. These ranged in size from the larger visitas to barrios to sitios and rancherías. Ideally the church through ritual occasions, the church calendar, and rites of passage such as baptism, marriage, and death was the center of the pueblo and its population.3 The church and the daily, weekly, and seasonal occasions it sponsored and hosted were held to be the centers of the religious beliefs and practices of the residents.

Perhaps the daily reminder of most presence would have been the Angelus, the ringing of the church bells at morning, noon, and evening times to commemorate and remind parishioners of the expected devotion towards the Roman Catholic belief in the Incarnation. The Franciscan statutes that define the responsibilities of the missionaries as parish priests in the Philippines described the expectations:4

On ordinary days, only toll once on the big bell for early Mass, and forother Masses and for Vespers toll once with the large bell and once withthe second bell, as is customary. For Matins, always toll once with thelarge bell and at the entrance another time with the second bell.

2 The classic study for the Philippines is Donn Hart, The Philippine Plaza Complex: A Focal Point in Culture Change (New Haven, Connecticut: Southeast Asia Studies, Yale University, 1955), though he may have presented an idealized picture with more regular grids and patterns of locations than was the rule in the Islands.

3 I draw extensively from the useful 1982 dissertation kindly made available for my study and use by its author, Luis D. Balquiedra, The Development of the Ecclesial and Liturgical Life in the Spanish Philippines. A Case of Interaction between Liturgy, Cult of Saints and Extraliturgical Religious Practices in the Upbuilding of the Filipino church in Franciscan Pueblos 1578-1870 (Ph.D. dissertation, Doctor in Sacred Liturgy, The Pontifical Liturgical Institute S. Anselmo, Rome, 1982. 765pp.), which I will refer to as Balquiedra in cases of multiple references.

4 Estatutos, y ordenaciones de la Santa Provincia de S. Gregorio de Religiosos Descalzos de la regular, y mas estrecha Observancia de N. S. P. S. Francisco de Philipinas. Dispuestas, y ordenadas por el Compromisso de el Discretorio, y Diffinitorio en el Capitulo Provincial celebrado en nuestro Convento de Nuestra Señora de los Angeles de la Ciudad de Manila el dia 8. del mes de Junio del año de 1726. Y mandadas dár á la estampa por el Ministro Provincial, y Venerable Diffinitorio el año de 1730. Manila: Imp. de dicha Provincia, 1732. 240, [89] pp. I am translating from the photocopy of Chapter 7 of these Estatutos in Balquiedra, Appendix 11, pp. 549-567. I will refer to this edition in future citations simply as Estatutos. The quotation presented here is from section nine of this chapter, entitled “Del Tocar las Campanas.”

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The church bells were tolled as well for special events, such as visits by senior ecclesiastical officials or fellow Franciscans, for funerals (different for children from adults), and of course on Sundays and feast days. The sounds of the bells would have been a routine and customary part of a parishioner’s life, ideally reminding all of the Roman Catholic Christian faith and its obligations and expectations of belief and behavior.

Balquiedra reminds us that there were also special times during the normal week to ring the bells to signal divine and mundane activities, such as “to remind people to perform a particular house chore: e.g., bells at 10 o’clock in the morning and 4 o’clock in the afternoon are signal[s] to begin washing and cooking the rice for noon and evening meal[s], respectively” (Balquiedra, 624n8). The bells were also used to regulate the activities of the boys attending divine and secular indoctrination and education under the care or supervision of the parish priest:5

Every day the boys gathered in the church with their Maestro at thesignal from the campanario in the morning. The first act was to sing devoutlythe Te Deum together with the versicles and oration of the Blessed Trinity. After this hymn they sang the Prime of the Oficio Parvo of the Mother of God with the frailes. The Mass followed immediately at which devout persons ofthe pueblo assisted and after which they recited the rosary with those wholingered in the church after the Mass. From there the boys went to their assigned places to begin the day’s study. At about midday the church tower bells were sounded twice for the boys to go home for lunch. At about twoo’clock in the afternoon the church tower bells were sounded again for theboys to return to the church. Once gathered in the church at the appointed time they said the Oficio Parvo, after which they went to study until aboutfive o’clock in the afternoon.

Balquiedra adds that “At this point the afternoon procession of the rosary began,” which confirms what manuscript sources indicate: the schoolboys, weather permitting, were expected to parade through the streets in the late afternoons praying the Rosary, with both male and female young people present and participating on Saturdays and Sundays.6 Balquiedra then completes

5 Balquiedra, 107-108, citing Estatutos, 128-130; and Juan Francisco de San Antonio, O.F.M., Chronicas de la Provincia de S. Gregorio de Religiosos de N.S.P.S. Francisco en las Islas Philipinas, China, Japón, etc. (Sampaloc: Imp. de O.F.M. en el Convento de Nra. Señora de Loreto, 1738-44, 3v.), 2:14. I will refer to it subsequently as San Antonio, Chronicas.

6 AFIO 79/24, Casañes, Fr. José, Provincial, Patente, Manile, 20 July 1777 [exhorta a la fiel observancia de la Regla y de sus obligaciones como cristianos y como Ministros de las almas.], f. 11: “… en los Pueblos de que los muchachos de la Escuela salgan rezando el Rosario por las Calles de parte de tarde todos los dias si el tiempo no lo impide: El que procuren que esta Santa Devocion tantas veces mandada por nros Antecesores la practiquen mas principalmente los dichos muchachos con el Maestre de la Escuela, asistiendo tambien toda la gente joven de ambos sexos, que pueden concurrir en todos los Sabados, y Domingos por la tarde, y en estos dos dias procurará el

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the daily routine, still focused on the schoolboys, by saying that after the public procession with rosary, the boys “gathered in the church [sand] prayed the Ave Marias while the bells signaled the prayer time to the rest of the community. Thereafter they all went home for the evening rest.”

These boys and young men would have been children of the Filipino families resident in and around the población. Their indoctrination and education would have been critical in perpetuating the orthodox forms of the Christian religion and for providing the accessory personnel to help staff the church rituals and special occasions:7

… the able and talented students were reserved for the servicio de la Iglesia y culto de Dios: some for the office or ministry of cantor, others for that ofsacristan. Soon these boys participated in the singing of the Divine Praises and the celebration of the Mass and administration of the sacraments. … The active participation of the boys in liturgical services edified the people of the pueblos and lured them to likewise assist at religious functions.

The training of the boys concentrated on reading, writing and counting …, the Doctrina Cristiana and music. The learning of Christian doctrine consisted in knowing by heart the principal Christian prayers (such as Pater noster, Ave Maria, Credo, Salve and acts of principal Christian virtues) and the question-and-answer part of catechism known as the Tocsohan, which dealt with the fourteen articles of faith, the seven sacraments, the seven capital sins, the fourteen works of mercy, the Ten Commandments, the five commandments of the Church and the act of general confession. The students recited the prayers and the Tocsohan in a loud voice, morning and afternoon. They also sang them in the church on Sundays and holy days in the presence of the assembly before or after the Mass.

Balquiedra continues8 by pointing out that in “all these activities the Maestro de escuela—who was one of the most talented and responsible Filipino Indios in the community especially

Religioso Ministro asistir tambien si sus ocupaciones no se lo impiden para que de este modo se animen los del Pueblo a tan Santa Devocion en honor de Maria Santissima madre de Dios, y señora nuestra, y lograr su intercession, su amparo, y Patrocinio en todas nuestras necesidades, para el major servicio de Dios, de Nra Santa Madre la Yglesia, de las Christiandades que están a ntro Cargo, y de la Conversion de todos los Infieles.” There is a similar exhortation, from 1783 this time, but adding that this practice might also be used by the priest to encourage the planting “de la Pimienta, Algodon, y demas plantas…” (AFIO 79/29, Cabeza, Fr. Santiago de la, Provincial, Patente, Manila, 3 August 1783, f. 6v-7).

7 Balquiedra, 105-106, based in part on the Estatutos, 134.

8 Balquiedra, 105-106, based in part again on p. 134 of the Estatutos.

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trained … and who was always a good musician—guided the boys.” Almost every Franciscan parish had such a school for boys9, at least by the early eighteenth century.10

With the Escuelas … there sprang up in every pueblo a group ofchosen talented boys called Tiples with soprano voices who composed thelocal canturia …, to sing the important hymns of the Divine Office and the sung parts of the Holy Mass. …

The boys of the Escuelas carried their liturgical and ecclesial formation on to the community when they graduated from the schools. Alot of them became members of the official canturia of the pueblo destinedfor all liturgical services that required singing. Having been trained in singing and playing musical instruments, these graduates became the Cantores reservados (official, salaried cantors) by royal decrees for theliturgical functions of the pueblos. They were individuals of tribute-payingage who besides being salaried were exempted from paying the tribute inreturn for their services to the Church during liturgical celebrations.

Thanks to Balquiedra’s work, we have managed to catch what I call the ideal life in the pueblos centered on the church and associated rituals. We have seen how the bells regulated daily and spiritual life during the week, noted that there was to be schooling for at least the male part of the school-age children, participation and indoctrination of those boys into the major formularies of the Roman Catholic Church, performance of those boys for kith and kin in processions in the street, recitations in school and in church, and of course presence and assistance during Mass.

We have also seen that there could be recognition and responsibility for Filipino males of talent in teaching and in music.11 Balquiedra notes that for every 500 tributes or houses, the

9 “… that they say the prayers as they have been taught by the Maestro and Maestra [in the schools] …” is part of a 1703 manuscript by a Spanish Franciscan in the Islands, suggesting that education for all children might have occurred by at least that date [Fondo Franciscano, Biblioteca Nacional del Museo de Antropología e Historia, Vol. 160, ff. 16-38v: “Informe, a petición de fray Agustin de Madrid, sobre la Buena administración de las doctrinas Franciscanas en Filipinas (1703),” f. 17].

10 This observation is taken from Balquiedra, 104, citing San Antonio, Chronicas, 2:13. The quotation that follows here is taken from Balquiedra, 109, 109-110, citing in part San Antonio, Chronicas, 2:18.

11 Multiple references exist in the literature attesting from early Spanish times onward to the notable musical skills of many Filipinos. In the Franciscan manuscript, the fullest manuscript reference seems to be AFIO 68/8, Instrucciones a nuestros misioneros acerca de la predicación y confesión de los indios. Ms. Anónimo. 1703. 14ff.; here, f. 1. Here we find brief comments such as “son los Indios bastantes Musicos, como yo a visto en Pila año de 1686, a unas dispenas de el Corpus, que cantaron a cinco cores, sin tropezar en ellas. Vemos que hazen instrumentos musicos, y los tocan con primor.” There is also reference to “un Indio de Camarines llamado Alonso,” who made at least two organs, one of which a Franciscan took to China. There is also reference to an unnamed Filipino in Nagcarlan who made an organ in 1703; and to another Filipino (also unnamed), who made one in Lilio.

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Franciscan Constitutions decreed eight official cantors (Balquiedra, 110), suggesting a significant avenue for income, exemption from the tribute, and public recognition for a fair number of Filipino males of talent. Another position that boys might work up to would be sacristan, with some possibility that these and other positions might be transmitted both by talent as well as by family legacy: “To the present-day it is not unusual to find the office of the Sacristan mayor, cantor or organist of the pueblo being inherited from one generation to the next” (Balquiedra, 112).

Another position open to Filipino men in the pueblo church was the fiscal mayor or celador. This position, even more prominent in the pueblos than the senior sacristan, was held by “a Filipino Indio … who received a mandate from the ecclesiastical authority in order to serve as the right hand of the Ministro in matters pertaining to the preservation and promotion of the religious and moral order in the pueblo. It was important that he come from the class of the principales12 because his office demanded an ability to persuade or give orders to the people” (Balquiedra, 113). He, along with the Filipino mayor or gobernadorcillo shared pride of place and prestige in processions, following side by side with his secular counterpart, right behind the priest:

The … fiscal received a vara (staff of office and symbol of authority), which was handed to him in a special ceremony after the Misa Mayor of a feast-day. In Franciscan pueblos the Fiscal mayor received the mandate in apatente (certificate of office) from the Provincial Superior through the Ministro of the pueblo, while two or more fiscales menores or fiscalillos were appointed by the Ministro himself at his discretion to act as assistants to the senior fiscal. The minor fiscals also received and carried their varas and exercised the same authority as the senior fiscal in a subordinate capacity. …

The office of the fiscals had a wide-ranging ecclesial and liturgicalsignificance. It was part of the holistic machinery used by the missionaries in Hispanizing and Christianizing the Filipino Indios. The fiscal was theexecutive arm of the Ministro in the administration of the pueblo from the spiritual and moral point of view. (Balquiedra, 113-114)

Balquiedra adds that “the success of a Ministro’s administration of the pueblo depended very much—socially and politically, ecclesially and liturgically—on” the cooperation of the fiscals. Indeed, I have the sense that the fiscal as well as the other Filipino Church officials in the pueblo were the mainstays of church administration, similar to the Secretaries in British 12 This is a term of great significance in Philippine history, with a principalía made up of a group of principales, signifying the higher class of Filipinos in a pueblo. Usually they controlled the major municipal and ecclesiastical non-priestly offices. A principal and the extended family were almost always those with wealth, position, and power in the municipality. The classic study is by Norman G. Owen, The Principalia in Philippine History: Kabikolan, 1790-1898,” Philippine Studies, 22 (1974), 297-324.

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administration who keep the records and the forms and the calendars while the political appointees, the Ministers, came and went. They and the Franciscan priest’s financial officer, the Sindico, along with the rest of the principalia may have in effect run the municipality. This is supposition on my part—even the names of the church officials are hard to recover from the documentary record—and their effective power presumably would vary according to the experience and health of the parish priest. If I am right, though, the positions must have required consummate political skills, both to acquire as well as to hold and use.

Returning to the theme of the ideal functions of the church in the pueblo, in the next few pages I want to outline briefly the sequence of rites and performances and obligations associated with Easter in the Franciscan parishes. I will highlight as usual Filipino responses and participation and obligation rather than present a thorough focus on the religious content and meaning of the ceremonies and calendar’s events. The Easter season consists of Lent and the subsequent Easter week or Semana Santa (Holy Week), culminating in the reverence for the story and message in the crucifixion of the son of their god on Friday and the son’s resurrection on Easter Sunday. “Penance for Filipino believers properly began with the Lenten season, the roughly month and one-half before Easter Sunday. As privileged Christian neophytes” Filipino Christian were “obliged to fast on Fridays and on Holy Saturday only, while their obligation of abstinence was in vigor during the whole season of Lent” (Balquiedra, 228).

Lent was not just a period of preparation for the drama and significance of the junior member of their divine trinity’s earthly triumph, crucifixion, and resurrection, but also for preparing for the annual confessions of the parishioners. Here again the priest relied greatly upon the church officials and upper class Filipinos in the población:13

During Lent then a great deal of time was spent in organizing the fiscales and other men and women of the principalía class who had to help the Ministro in preparing the faithful for confession.

The Ministro chose several respectable old men and women, knowledgeable in Christian doctrine, and declared them to the communityto be the official ,..,. examiners of all those who had to go to confession.Women presented themselves for examination to women-examiners; mento men-examiners. … Those who failed in the presacramental examination,or who were found deficient by the priest during actual confession, were sent back to the fiscales for remedial instruction.

13 Balquiedra, 230. The Franciscans were explicit on the need to rely on lay people for help: “porque en pueblos grandes no puede el Ministro acudir a todos, fuera de que muchos con el miedo y respect que tienen al Ministro, se turban.” Quotation taken from Balquiedra, 660-661n6, which in turn cites AFIO 344/2, “Constituciones de esta Provincia de S. Gregorio de Filipinas de Religiosos descalzos de N.P.S. Francisco … de 1663, añadidas el año de 1684, 120 hojas mas,” ff. 72v-73.

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Once the believer demonstrated competence in these basic components of knowledge of the faith, he or she would receive admission to confession. Filipino participation was essential, not just for the obvious participation in the practices associated with the faith but, more importantly, through the essential preparation and certification of the competence of the believers. In both ways, the priest could not do his job without that Filipino involvement.

Filipino participation was not just through teaching others, mastery of the catechism, confession, and attendance at the ceremonies and celebrations of the Easter season. Fasting was closely associated with church participation and at least in the seventeenth century Filipinos in the Franciscan areas were

very heedful of their fasts. Although for the meantime His Holiness does not oblige them to fast during the whole period of Lent but only on its Fridays and on two vigilias of the year, they still fast on their own accord; some three days of the week; others, throughout Lent; still others do not want to eat rice which is their ordinary bread. They live through the Holy Week only on cooked tubers.14

Even without extra devotion the obligations were significant: “to fast and abstain only on all Fridays of Lent, Holy Saturday and on the Vigils of the Nativity of Our Lord; but they had to abstain from meat on all days of Lent, the Ember days, the Vigils and all Fridays of the year” (Balquiedra, 190).

There was also self-flagellation, through the use of what was called the “disciplina—a whip for inflicting corporal punishment as a means of mortification” (Balquiedra, 233). This was a practice that Filipinos might have picked up from observing Franciscan practices of self-mortification and other forms of sacrifice for their faith. At least in the late sixteenth century, and almost certainly thereafter, there was a pattern of such self-flagellation among some Filipino believers, along with the carrying of crosses to emulate the crucified son of their god: ”When the time of Lent comes … few are the days in which there are no disciplines and much blood; they carry heavy crosses and perform other mortifications.”15 I will return to self-flagellation a bit later. Less dramatic but perhaps even more intense were forms of public participation in the Easter cycle and its attendant mysteries and message.16

14 Balquiedra quotation and translation (Balquiedra, 190) from Marcelo de Ribadeneyra, Historia de las islas del archipiélago y reynos de la gran China, Tartaria, Cochinchina, Malaca, Sian, Camboxa, y Iappon, y de lo sucedido en ellos a los religiosos descalzos de la orden del seraphico padre San Francisco de la Provincia de San Gregorio de las Philippinas (Barcelona, 1601), 48.

15 Balquiedra, 233 and 662n15, again citing Ribadaneyra, 49.

16 The manuscript sources for this information are scant, so I have drawn from the University of Chicago, Philipine Studies Program, Area Handbook on the Philippines (New Haven, Connecticut: Human Relations Area Files, 1956. 4v.) [henceforth abbreviated as Chicago Handbook] and the Balquiedra dissertation for most of my information. As we follow through the Easter cycle, we will see a sustained pattern of Filipino involvement and passionate belief

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We begin in February, with the celebration of the feast of the Purification of the Blessed Virgin Mary, “which commemorates her ritual cleansing at the Temple in Jerusalem, forty days after the birth of Christ, according to Jewish Law (Luke 2:22-32). Associated with this ceremony is a Mass, and before the Mass the priest blesses candles.” For this reason the feast is called Candlemas Day or Candelaria and the candles are later used “on the occasion of thunder and lightning, fire, earthquake, sickness or death.” Some also bring “seed-palay, and other products of the field to be blessed on this day,” but [u]nlike the blessing of candles, the blessing of seed-rice after [M]ass on the feast of Candelaria is not a part of the official liturgy for the day” (Chicago Handbook, v. 2, 557). Also in February is Ash Wednesday, marking the start of the season of Lent (Kuwaresma in Tagalog, cuaresma in Spanish), where parishioners would receive the mark of ash on their foreheads before the celebration of main Mass that day; these marks would be worn throughout the day, and sometimes until they wore off on their own. Balquiedra indicates that where possible the priest would carry “blessed ashes” from the población to the visitas and barrios for application to those unable to come to the población, such was the Filipino desire to participate, to receive this mark of penance (Balquiedra, 237-238).

Among the devotional practices included in the Lenten period, I should mention public devotions in from of inspirational and instructional Stations of the Cross (Istasiyones ng kurus).17 There the death sentence, Calvary, and crucifixion of Jesus their Christ was invoked, which was done both privately and publicly on the Sunday afternoon following Ash Wednesday. During the public ceremony there was the singing of a Tagalog “translation of the traditional Spanish hymn, Perdon, oh Dios mio,” Patawad po oh Diyos ko (Chicago Handbook, v. 2, 560). This ceremony might be repeated at various times, particularly two weeks before Easter on Passion Sunday. There might as well be Passion Plays offered during Holy Week, plays that are called sinakulo in the Philippines. Participants were and are generally all Filipinos, usually local residents (though at least in the twentieth century we are told that professional troupes were not unknown), with lots of preparation and rehearsal time devoted by all involved.

Among the other private and public devotional and instructional practices associated with Easter in the Philippines, perhaps one of the most important is the pabasa ng pasiyon, or reading of the Christian Passion story as a way both to teach the major historical myths of that religion as well as the means by which believers identify with the suffering and redemption associated with the life story of Jesus. The Chicago Handbook describes the twentieth century pattern v. 2, 563-565:

in their religion and religious practices. The eighteenth-century practices are assumed to have been similar.

17 Balquiedra, 243, speculates that the now-standard number of fourteen stations might have varied in Franciscan and other pueblos in the Philippines before 1731, when Pope Clement XII “issued the monita through which he limited the number of stations to fourteen.”

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The pabasa can be succinctly described as the chanting of the pasiyon conducted before an altar traditionally decorated (in the [v]isita or, more commonly, in a private home). The time consumed by this practice varies from place to place, but it is frequently said that about twenty-four hours are needed to complete a pasiyon from cover to cover. Some are of the opinion that the reading, once begun, should not be discontinued except upon completion of the entire text. But whether the reading be of the marathon variety, or be spread out over several days or even weeks, the obligation of the host or sponsor includes that of providing fitting food and refreshment not only for the chanters, who may spell each other, but also for the invited guests. Pabasa will be conducted by many families in a large community, and in the case of such a home affair, the greater number will hold just a single day-long session. The day chosen for this will usually be one which is traditional….

The personnel involved in the chanting are usually women, some of whom gain no small fame in a locality for their ability to sing the rhyming verses of the pasiyon. …

Balquiedra remarks that “In some places we still meet old men and women who can sing the entire Pasyong Mahal from memory” (248). It seems highly likely that this form of Filipino devotion existed in earlier centuries as well, though there may have been some difference in core texts used in different mission regions.18

The next major stage of the Easter cycle is Palm Sunday, Palaspasan in Tagalog, with the “blessing and distribution of palm branches” to commemorate “the triumphal entry of Christ into Jerusalem the Sunday prior to his crucifixion,” followed of course by a short procession and a Mass and reading of “the Passion according to Saint Matthew” (Chicago Handbook, v. 2, 569). Filipinos also bring palm fronds and creatively woven palm candleholders and such to be blessed, and children are active both in the procession as well as in associated folk practices, including the scattering of flower petals which are subsequently used with rice seed to help promote “a rich rice crop” (Chicago Handbook, v. 2, 573). Balquiedra suggests that in some

18 The Chicago Handbook says (563-565) that “Every major language of the Philippines has its own version of the Pasiyon, and some have more than one. But all are alike in being composed of rhyming verses to be chanted by the participants. In Tagalog, the best known Pasiyon is that of Mariano Pilapil, entitled Kasaysayan ng Pasiyuong ni Hesukristong Panginoon natin, or ‘History of the Sacred Passion of Jesus Christ our Lord.’” Balquiedra mentions the book Passio duorum “composed by a Franciscan friar in the sixteenth century,” and known more formally as Tratado de devotissimas y muy lastimosas contemplaciones de la Passion del hijo de Dios y de la Compassion de la Virgen sancta Maria su madre, por esta razon llamado Passio duorum. “All the [Franciscan] Constitutions up to 1753 made references to this book,” and it was translated into Tagalog and presumably Bicolano (247). He also mentions the 1846 Tagalog translation of the Jesuit Passion, by Tomas de Villacastin, S.J., Pasiong Mahal ni Jesucristong Panginoon. Isinalin sa wikang Tagalog ni Gaspar Aquino de Belen (Manila: Impr. Amigos del País, a cargo de D. Feliciano Calvo, 1846), 248 and 667n43. Also see Reynaldo Clemeña Ileto, Pasyon and Revolution. Popular Movements in the Philippines, 1840-1910 (Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 1979), 344pp.

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former Franciscan pueblos (he specified Lucban), there was the practice of the Way of the Cross on Palm Sunday afternoons followed in the evenings by the singing of the Passion (667n42).

Within Holy Week itself there are the major ceremonies associated with “Holy Wednesday,” “Maundy Thursday,” “Good Friday,” “Holy Saturday,” and of course Easter Sunday itself. In and amidst these ceremonies, with their Masses, processions, and special rituals, are a variety of public acts of piety involving much of the population either as participants or as witnesses. For instance, starting either on Wednesday or Thursday (practice varied, evidently), there were public processions with floats carrying statues representing “various aspects of the Passion, and the persons who participated in these happenings,” including Jesus, Mary Magdalene, Pilate, Mary the Mother, John the Baptist, and so forth (Chicago Handbook, v. 2, 573-574):

These statues (mounted on floats) are frequently more than a century old, and have been passed on as family heirlooms. They are the property of individual families and are housed, except for these days or others when they are used for church activities, in the homes of the owners. This rule admits of exceptions, of course, but the majority of these images are not church property … the ownership of these large and often precious images is purely a family matter. …ownership usually resides with the more affluent and influential kin groups.

Balquiedra mentions the use of these statues or pasos, which could be either “a picture or tableau” or “sculptured wooden images.” He observes that “There exist in some Filipino townships very old images of the pasos still being used for the Holy Week processions which according to popular tradition go back to Spanish times,” some of which “came to be the property of certain families…” (244).19

Balquiedra indicates that in Franciscan pueblos the practice was for these processions with images to take place on Thursday, after supper:20

19 Also see Victor S. Venida, “The Santo and the Rural Aristocracy,” Philippine Studies (44:1 (1996), 500-513), who remarks on p. 511 that “Further research is needed on the extent of land ownership, expenditures, and ecclesiastical regulations attendant to these celebrations.”

20 Balquiedra, 287-288, citing the Bacvlo, Chapter 22, paragraph 20. The Bacvlo referred to is a manuscript in two parts found in AFIO (AFIO 137/1 and AFIO 345/9). I will refer to it hereafter to the contemporary spelling of Baculo. Literally it means stick or staff, as used by a pastor or bishop. The citation used in Balquiedra, 731, is

San Jose(ph) Francisco de.Bacvlo de Parrocos y Ministros de Doctrinas que observan los Religiosos de N.P.S. Francisco en

esta Provincia de S. Gregorio el Magno de estas Islas Philipinas para su Alivio nuevamente arreglado a las Constituciones, Ceremonial y Doctrina de Novicios de esta Provincia y expurgada de algunas cosas antiguas. Año de 1740. Compuesto por el M.R.P. Predicador Fr. Francisco de S. Joseph: Religiosos Descalzo de la Seraphica Orden de N.P.S. Francisco y actual Ministro Provincial de la Provincia de estas Islas Philipinas. Año de 1686. En 4o sin foliar. [Ms. ends abruptly in chap. 19]. [This is AFIO 137/1}

13

There were several wooden images that were to be carried in the Procession: that of Jesus carrying the cross (Nazareno), the Blessed Virgin,the Veronica and San Juan. The images were dressed in black saya (skirt) as sign of mourning and white toca (cornet [headdress]). It was an old custom in the Franciscan pueblos that women of the principalía class carried the images of women saints on their andas or portable platform. …

Balquiedra continues by indicating that while most of the procession “went out of the main door with the images of the Nazareno, the Blessed Virgin and San Juan,” “the image of the Veronica [the woman who reputedly wiped the sweat and blood from the face of Jesus when he was carrying the cross toward the Mount of Calvary], carried by women, went out of the side door,” “traced a different path, and met the rest of the procession when it had gone about a third of the way. “Here, the Veronica made three curtseys to the image of the Nazareno and then fell in behind the other images in the procession and completed the route with the others.”21

There is a useful description in the Chicago Handbook regarding an Easter practice in the long-time, former Franciscan pueblo of Paete, which combines statues with the Passion Play:22

In the Laguna town of Paete, famous for its woodcarving, a PassionPlay is presented each year on Maundy Thursday, but in this drama wooden saints with movable joints play the roles of the Virgin Mary and Veronica, and three meetings (salubong) with Christ highlight the Way of the Cross. For a stage, Paete’s Passion Play has the town streets, and for a living cast to assist the wooden counterparts, five people with speaking parts, including a narrator and a Roman lector, the lone villain of the performance. Just as important are the men who are hidden beneath the floats of the statues and manipulate the ropes, pulleys, and levers which operate the famous moving saints of Paete. The town has been famous for this since the latter part of the eighteenth century.

In addition to this variation in Paete, Good Friday itself had other and specific customs associated with it in the Franciscan-administered pueblos of the colonial Philippines. Some

Bacvlo de Ministros. En 4o sin foliar. [Ms. begins with chap. 19, no title page]. [This is AFIO 345/9]. Balquiedra gives us a more abbreviated citation when he explains the abbreviations he uses (576):

BacvloBacvlo de Parrochos y Ministros de Doctrina en la Provincia de S. Gregorio. Año 1686. Manual in

Ms. form, in 2 vols. (chap. 1-middle 19 in vol. 1; chap. 19-27 in vol. 2), no paging.

21 Balquiedra, 289, citing the Baculo, Chapter 22, paragraph 20.

22 Chicago Handbook, v. 2, 583-584, with a reference as well to the Manila Sunday Times Magazine, April 17, 1949: 19-21.

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practices were relatively standard.23 In the early afternoon, within the church itself, there was the Siete Palabras, a “three-hour session of sermons, hymns, and prayers to commemorate the three hours which tradition specifies as the length of time that Christ hung on the cross on the first Good Friday” (Chicago Handbook, v. 2, 586). Others practices varied from place to place, such as the custom of walking “to church on this day, even though the distance involved is three to four kilometers under a tropical sun. In some places, the parasol is tabooed, along with slippers. Noise and children’s playing may be outlawed ‘because the Lord is dying,’ and in Pasig, Rizal, the old people are especially intolerant of any nailing since this action would help those who crucified Christ” (Chicago Handbook, v. 2, 584).

It was also on Good Friday that public flagellation occurred, usually from around noon to mid-afternoon. Most of the literature speaks of use of the whip on self by priests, but this particular expression of Easter self-mortification seems to have been expressed by some lay Spaniards as well as by Filipino parishioners.24 Mortification, la disciplina in Spanish, was prescribed as a regular part of the priest’s religious ritual. In the Franciscan Province’s constitutions there was regularly a section devoted to this expectation and practice.25 During Easter, the priest was expected, according to the 1687 Constitution, to practice such disciplina inside of the Church, in front of the worshipers.26 23 AFIO 17/65, P. Juan de la Cruz, Copia de la carta al Comisario General. En los conventos se explica todos los domingos la Doctrina Cristiana y reza el Rosario. Prácticas piadosas. Misiones de China. Santa Ana, 20 June 1733, ff. 1:1v:Todos los Viernes de Quaresma se tiene en todos los Pueblos el Via Crucis saliendo Procesionalmente de la Yglesia con much edificacion de los Yndios, y se concluye en la misma Yglesia descubriendose una Ymagen de Christo Nuestro Redemptor Crucificado cantando con toda solemnidad el Misere, que concluido se sienta el Religiosso en una Silla que ay en medio de la Yglesia algo levantada, y les explica algun punto de Doctrina Christiana, y muchas vezes por ser Quaresma, en que cumplen con la Yglesia el modo de Confessarse, y requisites para una Buena Confession, y demas de lo dicho en las festividades de entre año se les hace platicas dirigidas siempre a la mayor inteligencia de nuestra Santa fee, y Doctrina Christiana….

24 For a fuller eighteenth-century context for flogging and self-mortification—as well as for religious calendars, church attendance, marriage, and courtship practices—see Sister M. Caridad Barrion, O.S.B., “Religious Life of the Laity in Eighteenth-century Philippines as Reflected in the Decrees of the Council of Manila of 1771 and the Synod of Calasiao of 1773,” Boletin Eclesiastico de Filipinas, 34 (1960), 426-438, 490-501, 552-565, 698-708, 763-773; and 35 (1961), 43-51.

25 For instance, from the 1635 constitution (from Lorenzo Pérez, O.F.M., “Constituciones de la Apostólica Provincia de San Gregorio,” Archivo Ibero-Oriental, 31-93 (May-June 1929), 343-344): De la oracion y disciplina. CAP. 4. 1. Cada dia se haga disciplina despues de maitines antes de entrar en la oracion, saluo en los dobles y fiestas de guarder, infraoctaua de la Resurreccion, con los psalmos, antiphonas y las oraciones, que en la Prouincia se acostumbran; y en la quaresma se hara en Manila todos los dias, por que los seculars acudan a ella; la qual se haga a prima noche, despues del quarto de completes, except los domingos y fiestas de la Anunciacion de nuestra Señora, de San Joseph y San Gregorio.

26 Ibid., 260: “En el … [1687] Constituciones, se introdujo la variante de que en los Viernes de cuaresma se continue la costumbre de hacer la procession del Via Crucia después de la Benedicta, y, al regresar a la iglesia, se haga al pueblo una breve plática, o, en su lugar, se lea un poco en Passio duorum [on page 359 Father Lorenzo notes that this is a libro titulado Passio duorum, que en el siglo XVI compuso un Franciscano [note 13: Tratado de devotissimas y muy lastimosas contemplaciones de la Passion del hijo de Dios y de la compassion de la Virgen sancta Maria su madre, por esta razon llamado Passio Duorum, Medina del Campo, 1587].] o en otro libro de la Pasión, después de lo cual se hará la disciplina, como es costumbre, por espacio de un Miserere cantado con

15

The 1730 Franciscan constitution makes it clear that such self-scourging took place inside the church; and only for a short period of time during this sacred replication of the death of their savior:27

On Fridays of Lent let the custom of making the procession of the Via Crucis continue; it shall be done after the Benedicta. … Coming at the altars or pasos where the crosses are, the Ministro shall read and pray whatever the custom has established to read and pray. The booklets printed for this purpose shall be made … ready at hand. Returning to the church, the Ministro shall give a short [homily] … or shall read a little … about the Passion something that inspires toward devotion. Afterwards, the disciplina shall be performed as usual for the duration of a Misere which the cantors shall sing. It shall be concluded with the prayer, Respice quaesumus, and other prayers usually said on similar occasions.

More significantly for us, with our focus on Filipino parishioners, is that the custom of self-flagellation during the Easter season was commonly practiced by Filipinos in the Franciscan areas. This practice was recognized and implicitly endorsed by the Franciscans. We learn this from this observation by the Franciscan scholar P. Fr. Lorenzo Pérez, who served in the Philippines before and during the Philippine revolutions of 1896 and 1898 (in Spain thereafter he was in the early twentieth century the Franciscan archivist and foremost scholar of Franciscan Philippine history):28

Still in the present day [the 1920s], in distant barrios of parishes during Lent and particularly in Holy Week, in the Tagalog as well as Bicol regions,

acompañamuiento de órgano.

27 Balquiedra, 246, citing Estatutos y Ordenaciones de la Santa Provincia de San Gregorio de Religiosos Descalzos de la Regular, y Mas Estrecha Observancia de N. S. P. S. Francisco de Philipinas. Dispuestas, y ordenadas por el Compromisso de el Discretorio, y Diffinitorio en el Capitulo Provincial celebrado en nuestro Convento de Nuestra Señora de los Angeles de la Ciudad de Manila el dia 8. del mes de Junio del año de 1726. Y mandadas dár á la estampa por el Ministro Provincial, y Venerable Diffinitorio el año de 1730 (Sampaloc: Reimp. en el Convento de Nuestra Señora de Loreto del Pueblo de Sampaloc, 1753), 136, translation by Balquiedra. He adds at the end of the English translation “We are reminding again that caution must be taken not to permit women to stay inside the church during this act,” but this text is not in the excerpt he includes in the notes, Balquiedra, 666n38. I have not been able to check the statement against the original in the Estatutos, but the phrase implicitly makes the points that the Filipino self-flagellation was done inside the church and strongly suggests that males only practiced this penance in this public setting and at this period of the religious ceremonies. 28 Balquiedra, 360; text and translation from Balquiedra, 666n41 and 247: Aún en el día de hoy, en los barrios alejados de las parroquias, durante la cuaresma, y particularmente en la Semana Santa, tanto en el tagalog como en el bicol, acostumbran los Filipinos azotarse o dares disciplina, y mientras lo practican están recitando la Pasión en verso a dos coros: lo que indudablemente son reminiscencias de las antiguas practices de los Franciscanos, y seguramene que los versos que recitan son del Passio duorum.

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the Filipinos are accustomed to whip themselves or take up the discipline, and while they are doing so, they recite the Passion in verses in two choirs. This is undoubtedly the reminiscence of the old practices of the Franciscans ….

All such practices, by priest or by male parishioners, apparently were done as religious self-mortification and demonstration of dedication to the pueblo’s religion.

The practice of scourging as part of religious dedication and penance seems to have been fairly common during Lent and Holy Week, with perhaps only the Tuesday of Holy Week exempted from the practice of disciplina.29 After the Ash Wednesday church service, we again have a reference to the disciplina, “a fitting expression of the Christian’s desire to partake of Christ’s Passion (Balquiedra, 272). And, outside the church this time, there was a special place in the Holy Thursday evening procession for

penitentes de azotes (flagellants) … so that they would not spatter other people with blood. The disciplina which had remained all Lent inside the church now went public in the procession.30 Present practice, however, suggests to us that anonymity was preserved through the use of a kind of hood even at that time” (Balquiedra, 289).

And on Good Friday, after the representation of the crucified god had been brought down from the cross around three in the afternoon, in the procession that followed there were once again those punishing their bodies—but now women too sometimes joined, but only in non-public areas:31

Even in this procession there were penitentes de azotes. Thediscipline on this day must have been more assiduous since the contemplation of the sufferings and death of Christ had been particularly intense because Good Friday was the climax of the commemoration of the Passion and death of the Savior. The Baculo de Ministros referred to many flagellants who “are

29 Balquiedra, 268, citing Chapter 22, paragraph 11 of the Baculo. I do not know why Tuesday was different.

30 In the 1950s when the Chicago source was compiled, self-flagellation occurred outside of the church, during one of the more profound periods of Good Friday. It is not clear whether this was supplemental as described above or whether in-church self-flagellation was no longer practiced.

31 Balquiedra, 302-302, citing the Baculo, Chapter 22, paragraph 24. It appears that women applying the whip to themselves was not the problem, merely the place and behavior of those watching, as we see from the full quotation from the Baculo, which Balquiedra quotes on pages 678-679n139: La [segunda] costumbre [to be prohibited is] quen algunos pueblos salen a bandadas de mugeres estas dos noches, azotandose en la asentaderas, y no dezan de seguirles algunos vellacones gente moza, y es materia indecente, y que no se deve permitir, y mas quando en semejantes noches haze la Luna bastante clara, y si quisieren azotarse lo pueden hazer en sus casas or en el campo …”

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prone to faint in the street for lack of blood and consideration” and for whom the Ministro had to provide some emergency measures. It also made reference to groups of women who took up the discipline in secluded areas and whom the Ministro had to protect from any disturbing activities of the youth.

Most parishioners, of course, participated in the recapitulation of the religious myth and set of devotional practices in other ways. On the evening of Good Friday there was yet another public procession, again with statues, either carried individually or on floats (practice seemed to vary), especially of those individuals who figured prominently in the New Testament stories regarding Good Friday.

Holy Saturday marks the end of Lent and the start of the upturn to Easter Sunday and the resurrection of the Christian savior. Here again there was a Mass and associated ceremonies along with a variety of popular customs, with variations from place to place. Some of these customs include having children jump up and down, the tossing of infants in the air, all to “promote physical growth. Fruit trees are shaken in some communities, that they may bear abundant fruit” (Chicago Handbook, v. 2, 597). Balquiedra notes (Balquiedra, 686-687n177) that “In some former Franciscan pueblos, as in Lucban, people at home jumped or tossed little children up into the air at the sound of the repiques of the Gloria of the Sabado de Gloria for some unclear reason (people say they do this in order to grow taller); but perhaps it was in order to remind themselves of Christ’s ‘rising’ from the dead while imitating the rumbling of the earth when the tomb was opened. They also poured water at each other’s head, also for some forgotten reason; most probably it was to remind them of their baptism. The same practice is found in some places on the feast of John the Baptist.”

Easter Sunday was an occasion of great joy, including both Mass and the official liturgy. There were also folk enactments of the early morning meeting between the risen Jesus and Mary:32

and is portrayed in the procession which is called the “meeting,” salubong, or pasalubong, usually held before [M]ass. “The central event of this procession in the converging and meeting at an appointed spot of the images of the Dolorosa and the Risen Christ. Each image is carried by its own separate file of the faithful, women with the Dolorosa and men with the other statue and float. Each group leaves the church (or the image-owner’s home) taking a different route. After the meeting, a little “angel” removes the signs of mourning from the image of Mary, to reveal some joyful clothing beneath; the lines join and the procession returns to the church with the statues of mother and son now side by side. …

32 Chicago Handbook, v. 2, 599; there is also a description in Balquiedra, 326-336.

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There were subsequent dates of importance in this cycle as well, such as the Sunday after Easter, the Flores de Mayo celebrations during May, Ascension Thursday, Santa Cruz de mayo, Pentecost Sunday, Trinity Sunday, and so forth. Even though they highlight the patterns we have seen of intense Filipino participation and devotion, revolve around the implied role of the richer and población-dwelling principalía,33 and occur in some cases with processions, floats, statues, and always with Masses, they need not detain us.

In terms of popular participation, after Easter probably the most significant celebration in most parishes would have been the fiesta for the pueblo’s patron saint. Here we will again encounter the public and community expressions by Filipinos of incorporated church ceremonies along with associated beliefs. While individual practices could and undoubtedly did vary, from private beliefs or reservations to celebrations for a particular saint or obligations to a confraternity or sodality (cofradía),34 it appears clear that it was the celebration of the pueblo’s patron saint that showed the Filipino residents’ most enthusiastic and dedicated devotion to a manifestation of the Christian missionary message the Spanish priests brought to the Philippine archipelago in the late sixteenth century.

Filipino devotion and protection of their patron saints was and is legendary, showing their incorporation of faith and devotion into their very social and individual beings. Filipinos, I am told, felt and feel passionately about their pueblo patron saints as well as about the titular saints and venerated images linked to their local church. One way to manifest this passion was the village fiesta devoted to celebrating the pueblo’s patron saint. The expenses of such a fiesta were (relatively speaking) large, the popular participation tended to be passionate, and the draw and prestige of the celebration were of great importance. “The annual fiesta of the pueblo’s patron saint was a non-working day in that pueblo, even if it fell on a weekday. … And the whole populace of the pueblo shared the same festive liberality by welcoming to their own homes the many visitors from the neighboring pueblos who came to honor and pray to the pueblo’s patron saint” (Balquiedra, 367).

Major attention was given to decorations of the church and patio. This was organized and directed by the fiscal. In some pueblos decorated streets and houses were also part of the expected backdrop to the procession(s) and the general festivities. “To the Filipino Indios, the feast of the Santo Patrón was the liturgical and popular fiesta par excellence” (Balquiedra, 368). It included two theatrical presentations as well, comedia de santos, “one for the eve of the fiesta

33 “In a society neatly divided into the ‘haves’ and the ‘have-mores,’ it is the latter who consistently are given the honor and burden of this sponsorship [of community religious activities],” Chicago Handbook, v. 2, 671.

34 “In Franciscan pueblos the Archicofradía del Cordon was especially promoted by the frailes themselves” (Balquiedra, 651n115).

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and another on the feast-day itself,” with major parts reserved for the principales.35 Filipinos paid for and collected the funds to support these fiestas (Balquiedra, 375-376):

In each pueblo there was a Mayordomo de los bienes de la comunidad, that is, steward of the property of the community. In short, he was the Mayordomo de comunidad who must not be confused with the Mayordomo de la iglesia. The Mayordomo de comunidad was a government officer constituted to collect from every house a certain amount of rice during harvest time.

The collected goods formed the Bienes de comunidad (community property). The amount of contribution depended upon the means of the families, the poor being completely absolved from the obligation. The padrón de confesión of the preceding year in the possession of the Ministro de Indios was his guide as to who belonged to the pueblo and had the obligation to give him the contribution. The Mayordomo de comunidad submitted his account to the [provincial governor, a Spaniard], who had no claim whatsoever on the collected goods, but who authorized the distribution or disbursement of the property.

One third of the total amount was set aside for the expenses of the three principal feasts. The other third part went to remunerate the services of the persons serving at the convent [the priest’s residence, usually attached to or next to the church]. Two thirds of the Bienes de la comunidad were turned over to the care of the Ministro de Indios of the place, who allotted them to the persons concerned. The remaining one third was allotted for the salaries of the gobernadorcillo and the Mayordomo de comunidad himself, to be disbursed upon authorization of the [provincial governor].

The fiesta itself was officially blessed through the Mass, usually early in the afternoon before the actual day of the patron saint’s day, at first Vespers, before the major celebrations began. The ceremonies during and after the Mass incorporated major Filipino and community participation. For instance, the “afternoon singing of the First Vespers” by “not only the cantores reservados and boys of the Escuela” but also the general community present at the Mass (Balquiedra, 384), which underlines the importance of the fiesta as well as the participation from the populace. Before the Mass at First Vespers came a special mode of tolling the bells to summon the faithful, “which served as the diana or reveille and was prolonged by the playing of brass bands, which existed in every pueblo, marching through the streets of the pueblo. Then came a procession into the church organized strictly by rank (with Filipinos at the head—the Fiscal mayor, the gobernadorcillo, and two other principales), followed by twelve young dancing girls (las dalaguillas) from the community, and so forth (Balquiedra, 387-388).36 After the Mass 35 Balquiedra, 373 and 700n45, quoting the Baculo, Chapter 18, paragraph 5.

36 “The introduction of dancing then in the official liturgy was meant to enhance the celebration and hopefully to lead the native Filipinos to devotion and to the increase of their faith.,.. It was not meant to be a ritual symbolism [and] it remained only in the periphery of the liturgy. … they chose the dalaguillas, that is, young girls [because], according to the first Franciscan chronicler, ‘[the children] do things with such grace that they seem to be little

20

came the recessional, in reverse order, still with regulated ranks of precedence, solemnity, and significance.

Significant innovations and widespread participation mark the whole celebration when the day of the fiesta dawned. Because the procession of the Blessed Sacrament on the actual day of the fiesta was to precede the Solemn Mass, a priest privately celebrated the Mass very early” (Balquiedra, 393-394). Then came a solemn procession, this time with the “Blessed Sacrament …, together with the image of the Santo Patrón” (Balquiedra, 392). The official participants formed for the procession at the rectory and then marched into the church, again in order of precedence but this time led by the dancing girls. After some ceremonies and procedures at the altar, the Blessed Sacrament was collected and the procession formed again and exited the church, led by a banner, the processional cross, the dancing girls “in front or in between the images,” any visiting Franciscan father(s), the banner of the Most Holy Sacrament, church officials and incense burners, the priest and the Blessed Sacrament, the Fiscal mayor, the gobernadorcillo (with the provincial governor between them if he were present) and the other principales (Balquiedra, 396).

The procession moved from the church to the patio of the church complex, stopping with appropriate rites at each of the corners where four temporary altars had been erected and walking from place to place over the “sweet-smelling leaves and herbs” that had been strewn on the paths. The sounds of firecrackers and small, explosive rockets were set off while the church bells pealed (Balquiedra, 396-398). After the procession, they returned to the church and prepared for “the Solemn Mass with sermon in the presence of the Blessed Sacrament,” “the most solemn that could be had in those times [and the] fiestas of the patron saints and those of the [Franciscan] Order could not deserve anything less” (Balquiedra, 398).

angels.’ On the other hand no attempt was done at having adults dance during liturgical functions.” Balquiedra, 411-412, citing Marcelo de Ribadeneyra, O.F.M., Historia de las islas del archipiélago y reynos de la Gran China, Tartaria, Conchinchina, Malaca, Siam, Camboya, y Jappon, y do lo sucedido en ellos a los religiosos descalzos de la orden del seraphico padre San Francisco de la provincial de San Gregorio de las Philippinas (Barcelona: Imp. De Gabriel Graells y Giraldo Dotil, 1601), 55.

“… some dalaguillas would dress up on principal feasts and dance before” the priest.” “This holy custom should not be forgotten by the priest…” (Balquiedra, 411, from the Baculo, Chapter 19, paragraph 4, reproduced in Balquiedra, 711-712).

In two former Franciscan parishes, Obando and Pakil, “dancing with ritualistic symbolism or magical gestures has remained until the present day as devotional acts to the saints” (Balquiedra, 413); but otherwise the dancing associated with sacred ritual seems to have been confined to children, and then only “at Vespers, Solemn Mass and procession” (Balquiedra, 412).

Concerning dancing, a comparative dimension is added with the research in Cebu City by Sally A. Ness, Body, Movement, and Culture. Kinesthetic and Visual Symbolism in a Philippine Community (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992). In an essay, “When Seeing is Believing: The Changing Role of Visuality in a Philippine Dance” (Anthropological Quarterly, January 1995, 1-13), she notes on page 1 that “The Visayan language term sinulog translates roughly as ‘moving like a current’ and refers to a number of ritual practices performed throughout the Central Philippines. … Until sometime after the turn of the twentieth century, sinulog dancing served as a climactic event for the fiesta celebration for the Santo Niño, held annually during the third week in January[,] … inside the Augustinian church where the Santo Niño was kept….”

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There are as well other patron saints in a pueblo. While not the official patron saint, they also evoked similar patterns of activity, passion and devotion. “It was not uncommon that a pueblo celebrated two or more fiestas de patronos … one fiesta of the Titular and other fiestas of non-titular patron saints” (Balquiedra, 426). These usually did not involve quite the detail and expense, since these were not subsidized through compulsory contributions, presumably based entirely on voluntary donations. They might eliminate the theatrical presentations and cut back on the fireworks, and of course not include the procession with the Blessed Sacrament nor the Solemn Sung First Vespers (Balquiedra, 427). The fiesta associated with the pueblo’s patron saint was the major popular celebration in the Spanish pueblos. Attention to personal dress, presentations of fireworks, and cockfights would occur as well. Major fiestas would attract visitors from other pueblos, sometimes coming as a regular expression of piety. Fiestas today, I am told, continue today to be the most visible manifestation of Filipino spirituality and good cheer.37

We have seen something of the range of activities around the población and the pueblo church. We have seen manifold participation by a spectrum of Filipinos, from church officials (fiscal mayor or celador; Mayordomo de la iglesia, Sacristan mayor, fiscales menores or fiscalillos, cantor, organist), boys and girls as singers and dancers, pueblo officials and leading citizens (the gobernadorcillo, Mayordomo de comunidad, and principales), and other Filipino adult women and men. The picture sketched seems so far to be reliable, but it is an ideal projection of a pueblo population gleefully and actively participating in church-sanctioned events as the center of their preoccupations and actions.

Other rites and activities also occurred in the pueblos, such as courtship, marriage, birth, death, trade and marketing, crop cultivation and fishing, quarrels, gambling, drinking, fighting, surviving typhoons and Moro attacks, and so forth. The picture so far represents an ideal. It is rather one-dimensional. We need shadows to add depth, shadows some of which I will add in the following chapters. By the end of this short monograph we should have a fuller, more realistic view of Filipinos in eighteenth century Franciscan parishes.

37 See, for instance, Peter Harper and Evelyn Sebastion Peplow, Philippines Handbook (Chico, CA: Moon Publications, Inc., 1991), 91, 182-183 (for Obando), and 301 (Pakil). Also see Frank Lynch, S.J., Town Fiesta. An Anthropologist’s View,” Philippines International, 6:6 (1962), 20-27; reprinted in Aram A. Yengoyan and Perla Q. Makil, eds., Philippine Society and the Individual. Selected Essays of Frank Lynch, 1949-1976 (Ann Arbor, Michigan: Center for South and Southeast Asia, the University of Michigan, 1984), 209-223. A comparative look at colonial Mexican experiences with “Fiestas and Fandangos” is in William B. Taylor, Magistrates of the Sacred. Priests and Parishioners in Eighteenth-Century Mexico (California: Stanford University Press, 1996), 250-258.

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Sundays and Azotes

Not every day was a fiesta. The weekly schedule of the pueblo also contained an ideal scenario, a life centered on Sunday and Mass at the church in the población. With the Sunday Mass came mandated ceremonies and spiritual guidance. The pattern of the major Sunday Mass (there was an earlier one as well, for those with obligations to tend the sick or children or protect the pueblo from fires and robbers) began with the bells, summoning the parishioners to the church about 9 a.m. (“in some pueblos, much later, to give people time to come from distant visitas” (Balquiedra, 219):38

Taking into account what the Holy Council of Trent disposes concerningthe days on which the Ministro has to preach to the souls under his charge,we order that on Sundays … two or four sacristans or tiples [a tiple is a “boy with a soprano voice, usually supplying the female voice in an all boy choir” (Balquiedra, 492)] of the Escuela who knows the doctrina best, donned in surplices, shall go to the center of the church, before the start of the Misa Mayor or at its end—whenever the Ministro thinks there would be more people in the church. And they shall recite aloud—or sing—the prayers of the doctrina at one time and at another the Tocsohan39 to be complete, while all those in the church answer. In this way they shall not forget.

After the ceremony, there was time set aside for indoctrination and teaching:40

38 Estatutos, 132, translation by Balquiedra, 212, bold-facing added.

39 “ ‘Tocsohan’ is a Tagalog word, meaning ‘playful teasing’ or ‘teasing game,’ in which one party asks a question to be answered by the other party, the questioning and answering roles being reversed alternately after the correct answer has been given. The singing of the Doctrina Cristiana was precisely performed after this pattern with the difference that the tiples always took the questioning role” Balquiedra, 212-213, bold-facing added).

40 AFIO 345/9, f. 5v, Chapter 20, paragraph 7, translation taken from Balquiedra, 213. This period of guidance and explanation was a crucial component of the priest’s work, according to Franciscan codes and practice, though at times the Provincials would feel compelled to remind those with parishes of this, as in this 1718 case: La Predicazion, buen exemplo y Doctrino Christiana que devemos enseñare a los Yndios, estoy noticiado, que mucho de ustedes, Cuydan deponerlo en execuzion; pero por que no faltan algunos negligentes, no es precisso animarlos y exortar … que a los menos los Domingos y fiestas tengan obligazion los Curas a explicar a sus feligreses la Doctrina Christiana…” (AFIO 79/9, Fr. Mateo de San José, Provincial, Patentes. …21 April 1718, 1v). Even at Easter it (and the Tocsohan) may have been neglected: “En las mas Ministerios pareze que se ba dexando el Togsohan. Y en 24 años no a visto baxor a la Yglesia a Ministro alguno a preguntar y esplicar la Doctrina (como la Ordenacion manda) … Protesto aberme hallado quarto Quaresmas en Ministerios, y que en las tres no se dixo siguiera una palabra al pueblo. …” (AFIO 68/8, Instrucciones a nuestros misioneros acerca de la predicación y confesión de los indios. Ms. Anónimo. 1703, f. 7.

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After the Mass and the [recitation or singing of the] prayer, the Ministro shall go to the [center of the] church and shall ask the Indios about what they prayed in order to find out how they understand it. He shall teach them briefly what they do not understand, and without being very profound shall explain some points towards the understanding of the said doctrine

There is a suggestive quotation that for at least some an early departure from Mass was not unknown, especially just after the sermon: “when one is preaching and has finished the Mass, be very careful that people do not slip out of church.”41

The rest of the day was marked with lunch, Vespers at 2 p.m. (again with the Filipino boys and the cantors), and on some Sundays confessions heard until dusk. On Sundays when there were no confessions (Balquiedra, 220-221) “at around five o’clock the campana mayor would again strike twice to give signal for the recitation of the Completas (“The Compline, the last Canonical Hour of the Breviary” (Balquiedra, 483)) which was immediately followed by another installment of mental prayer. And so we come to the end of the day, marked by the Angelus and other routines (Balquiedra, 220-221):

At dusk around six o’clock in the evening the bells pealed joyful repiques [“Joyous peals of the church’s bells, announcing fiestas or joyfulChristian events …,” Balquiedra, 490] for the Ave Marias and the people left immediately for a couple of minutes whatever they were doing, faced the church and devoutly prayed the Angelus or Regina coeli. This was also the signal for young men and women and children to clear off the streets and plazas and start going home. At the same time the boys of the convent went to close the doors of the church as well as those of the convent and the frailes went to take their supper.

When darkness had set in at around eight o’clock in the evening the belfry would sound several dobles, a haunting call to all the faithful to pray for the souls in purgatory. This was immediately followed by eight deep, penetrating golpes of the big bell. The Animas—as this evening supplication for the souls in purgatory came to be known—was the last-announced prayer of the frailes which echoed in every native Filipino home. … Nobody was supposed to roam around the pueblo after the last stroke of the bell at the Animas. And the frailes and the people of the pueblo went into night rest, in God’s peace and protection.

41 Estatutos, 132, quoted in Balquiedra, 658n24 (my translation).

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Such was the pattern for Sundays, with of course more detail and ritual on more special Sundays and less on the more routine holy days.42 It is an inspiring picture and particularly important as it details the roles and importance of Filipino parishioners, singers, and Filipino church officials. Without Filipinos we would have merely a building and a priest, unless he too were Filipino (few Franciscans were43). Within the Church hierarchy, after the priest the importance and authority of the fiscal was supreme, followed by the sacristans, the maestro cantor and boy singers and acolytes, and so forth. The fiscals, as we saw earlier, were responsible for the decorum of the audience who were to witness what was believed to be the divine miracle through the Mass:44

In processions the fiscales must pay special care that the people, men as well as women, conduct themselves with attention and reverence in the church, not talking to one another nor masticating buyos [betel nuts]. To this effect they are to be posted at different points in the aisle of the church which must be kept always unobstructed.

The sacristans, attended by boys from the school as their assistants, “rendered the common services of acolytes” before, during, and after the Mass (Balquiedra, 202). There was also the Filipino Mayordomo de la Iglesia, chosen by the priest, who was charged with “keeping and recording all the alms—either in money or in kind—that the people donated for the upkeep of the church,” to maintain and protect the ritual ornaments and vestments of the church, to inspect and see to the repairs of the building and its altars, shrines, paintings, etc., as well as to provide the supplies of candles and other necessities for the Mass and the faithful (Balquiedra, 203). This must have been a position of remarkable importance and trust, not at all consistent with the prejudices of the Spanish regarding Filipino maturity and abilities (see below).

By the eighteenth century, probably even earlier, in the lowland parishes at least, all or almost all Filipinos attending Mass would have been brought up in that Spanish Roman Catholic faith and associated traditions. Probably too their grandparents and perhaps even their great grandparents had been born into this faith and expected practices. While knowledge and performance of the faith would still have to be taught to the children and young people, the faith 42 We can ignore some of the complexity of the Philippine Franciscan religious calendar, where Sundays “were classified according to their relationship with any of the Cuatro Pascuas (four pascal feasts) before or after them. The Cuatro Pascuas in the Spanish Philippines were” Christmas, the Epiphany, Easter, and Pentecost. “All Sundays of the year served either as preparation or prolongation of any of the four Pascuas, although the Pascuas themselves did not necessarily fall on a Sunday” (Balquiedra, 180-181).

43 I counted eleven Filipino Franciscans out of over 2,000 Franciscans in the islands from 1578 to 1898, which is less than 1%, “not a striking record of recruitment and opportunity” (Bruce Cruikshank, Spanish Franciscans in the Colonial Philippines, 1578-1898 (Hastings, NE: Cornhusker Press, 2003), v. 2, Appendix Seven, “Filipinos as Franciscan Clerics in the Spanish Philippines,” 181.

44 Baculo, Chapter 6, paragraph 13, translation by Balquiedra, 199.

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and church ceremonies were not novel to all or almost all of the Filipino parishioners and Filipino church officials.

There was both expectation and compulsion associated with the pueblo church. Seating itself was organized and certain forms of oral participation were mandated, as we learn from a manuscript source from 1703:45

Each Franciscan in every pueblo should take particular care each Sunday that before Mass the parishioners in the Church be grouped, withmen in one part and women in another, that they say the prayers as theyhave been taught by the Maestro and Maestra [in the schools] ….

Certain feast days in the church calendar as well as every Sunday of the year, “without exception,” were “holy days of obligation for every Christian wherever he might be in the Islands and of whatever nationality to hear the entire Mass and abstain from all servile works the whole day, under pain of mortal sin” (Balquiedra, 189). Filipinos were also subject to physical penalties for non-attendance: “The Franciscan Bacvlo de Ministros ordered 50 azotes (lashes) for those who customarily did not hear Mass on Sundays and holy days without sufficient excuse; 24 azotes for the first offense.”46

We know from a variety of evidence that slaps and whippings were common forms of correction and punishment throughout the Spanish imperial empire. There is little material regarding slapping, there is more on the use of the lash. This may have been because a slap would be more spontaneous and in most cases not part of a mandated punishment. I found one example of a slap and have assumed that others occurred and were not noted in manuscripts. This example is from a 1923 letter but the incident dates from the late nineteenth century in Baler (ca. 1879), when the priest discovered that the pueblo notables had failed to deliver sufficient building supplies for the scheduled repairs to the church. The Franciscan gave the gobernadorcillo, present holding the staff of office in his hand, “a slap in the face.” There were other pueblo officials as well as other people, including the Franciscan who witnessed it and the Spanish military commander of the region. None of the Filipinos reacted nor did the gobernadorcillo complain. The military commander, though, opined that it showed “a major disrespect towards [civil] authority” and called the gobernadorcillo in to submit a complaint to Manila. The gobernadorcillo, however, responded that since he had erred the priest had 45 Fondo Franciscano, Biblioteca Nacional del Museo de Antropología e Historia, Vol. 160, ff. 16-38v: “Informe, a petición de fray Agustin de Madrid, sobre la Buena administración de las doctrinas Franciscanas en Filipinas (1703),” f. 17. I quote more extensively from this later in the chapter.

46 Balquiedra, 185-186, citing chapter 10, paragraph 4 of the Baculo. Spaniards could, of course, be tried by the Inquisition for offenses against the common faith. I may be wrong, but I have never heard that Spaniards could be or were in fact whipped in the colonies simply for non-attendance at Mass. I am not sure if this punishment was in fact given with any frequency in Franciscan parishes.

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punished me [‘Yo he faltado y por eso el padre me ha castigado’] and refused to make a complaint. “This shows how great the respect and veneration all the pueblo of Baler, without distinction of class, had for the priests.” Perhaps. The priest in question was about 26 years old, the Filipino official was in his 40s.47

Unlike what may have been common use of slapping, the use of the whip was perhaps less frequent but is well-documented in the manuscripts. Apparently it was applied by missionaries throughout the Spanish colonial empire and was usual practice in other contexts as well. For instance, in colonial California, P. Fr. Francis F. Guest notes48

that whipping played a significant role in Spanish culture in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It was part of the domestic, social, and religious life of the people. Children were whipped at home and in the schools. Criminals were flogged in prisons. Servants were beaten by their masters. Indian house boys and ranch hands in Mexican California were whipped by their employers much as they had been by the padres at the missions. Among clergy, religious, and lay people self-flagellation was practiced by the devout for religious reasons.

We have already met with self-flagellation in the previous chapter, but its inclusion in this quotation is a bit disingenuous. We are talking not about suffering that was voluntarily chosen for religious reasons by pious believers. Rather, we are discussing punishments inflicted by others against the wishes of those being whipped.

In colonial contexts generally, it would have been the conquered and lower class subjects who most frequently received the azote. Whipping or other punishments directed at upper class Filipinos also occurred, however, and in some cases seem to have prompted significant retaliation against the priests.49 The most famous case where this occurred probably would have

47 Carta del P. Mariano al P. Lorenzo Pérez, Medina del Campo, 1-12-1923, 10 páginas de letra enuda, AP [AFIO], sign. 52-5, transcribed in Antolin Abad Pérez, O.F.M., “Los franciscanos en Filipinas (1578-1898).” Revista de Indias, 24:97-98 (July-December 1964), 411-444; here 439-444, quotations taken from p. 441.

48 Francis F. Guest, O.F.M., “Cultural Perspectives on California Mission Life,” Southern California Quarterly, 65: 1 (Spring 1983), 1-65; here, 14. For the Philippines, also see the references on pages 771-773 of Sister M. Caridad Barrion, O.S.B., “Religious Life of the Laity in Eighteenth Century Philippines as Reflected in the Decrees of the Council of Manila of 1771 and the Synod of Calasiao of 1773.” Boletin Eclesiastico de Filipinas [full reference in the Bibliography, below]. There is a brief reference to whipping as well in Jose S. Arcilla, “Slavery, flogging and other moral cases in 17th century Philippines.” Philippine Studies, 20:3 (1972), 399-416; here, 403.

49 The Mexican case suggests that public flogging of upper class members did occur and also generated the most significant cases of “spontaneous anger and violence villagers sometimes showed when the priest acted this way” (William B. Taylor, Magistrates of the Sacred. Priests and Parishioners in Eighteenth-Century Mexico (California: Stanford University Press, 1996), 220).

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been in 1649 in Palapag, Samar, when a Jesuit priest reprimanded a principal for his adulterous affair. The man was known as Sumoroy, a skilled pilot and seaman and in charge of the fortress and its guard. On the 1st of June 1649, he killed the Jesuit with a lance and led a serious rebellion against Spanish rule, ending only thirteen months later with the death of Sumoroy at the hands of one of the other rebels.50 Franciscan priests in the Samar in the eighteenth century observed that datus, using the old term for pre-Hispanic leaders, had a corps of followers who were “revered and loved.” “Among these people it is a grave crime to arrest a datu, no matter what the crime, whether the arrest is by a capitan or not.”51

Priests had to be very careful whom they punished, since clearly it would be a public humiliation and shaming and fundamentally dangerous if the victim could rally supporters to avenge it. One of the methods used was to try to pretend that the punishment came from another Filipino, probably a transparent stratagem. In the Philippines, for whippings decreed by parish priests for infractions, Filipinos were lashed usually by a Filipino church official, not by the priest personally.52

… the fiscal celador is chosen by the priest from among the ranks of honorable and well-known men in the pueblo, one who is a man of conscience and fears God. The job of this fiscal is to disinterestedly and in truth to punish those indios in the pueblo who have been denounced and admonished by the priest for their sins.

This punishment was carried out on the priest’s command and (usually) under his supervision. Twenty-five lashes were standard but twelve may have been more common.53 One does not

50 Summary based on pp. 198-199, Bruce Cruikshank, Samar: 1768-1898 (Manila: Historical Conservation Society, 1985).

51 AFIO 95/6, Relación de la Visita hecha a Samar por el P. José Martinez y Rosas con la relación de los costumbres de los naturales, armas que disponen para su defense contra los moros … relaciones escritas por los misioneros. Mss., 1775; as quoted in Cruikshank, Samar, 35-36.

52 Fondo Franciscano, Vol. 160, “Informe, a petición de fray Agustin de Madrid …, 18v. In this same manuscript, f. 25, there is an order from provincial governor to a Capitan Don Pedro de Avendaño Billela: “… save que en todos los dias festibos se zierran las puertas de las Yglecias, antes de acavar la Missa, y que despues por el Padron de Confeziones, unas Vezes el Ministro, y otras el Zelador los ba llamando y alque no haviendo, no siendo con justa caussa le amonestan, por la primera, segunda vez, y a la tercera le Mandan al zelador le de seis, o dose azotes en la Porteria, o puerta de la la Yglecia….” This is a remarkable intrusion by a government official into church matters and I do not know if this was in fact executed. The Zelador is a shortened term for the fiscal celador. I don’t know what pueblo this was, who the Capitan was, nor the context. Also see the 1763 incident from Isabela and the 1835 case from Ilocos Sur reported and discussed by William Henry Scott in “Colonial Whip. A Filipino Response to Flogging in 1835,” in his Cracks in the Parchment Curtain and Other Essays in Philippine History (Quezon City: New Day Publishers, 1982), 158-163.

53 AFIO 79/3, Fr. Mateo de la Asuncion, Provincial. Patente. Nuestra Señora de la Candelaria, Dilao, 11 June 1681 [exhorta a sus subditos al amor fraterno, a que traten con Caridad a los Indios, que no se entrometan en los asuntos seculars y que eviten todo trato con personas sospechosas], ff. 2-2v: “… se me ocurre advertir y mandar a VVCC

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know how frequently whippings were given nor whether they habitually had as victims both those Filipinos who lived in the población and those who lived in the surrounding communities, whether males as well as females were whipped, whether there were age limits, and how frequently (if at all) principales were whipped. We do know that whipping was a well-established punishment in the colonial Philippines, at least in theory, until perhaps the early nineteenth century.54

Franciscan limits on the number of lashes (twenty-five or less) seems to have been more moderate than the amounts imposed by civil authorities. Here we have figures of twenty-five and one-hundred lashes casually advocated by a non-clerical, government official for Los Baños in 1696. He begins with the settlement pattern of dispersion and how it is significantly deleterious to “proper” Christian life:55

In Los Baños [17 November 1696] … insofar as I am informed that the naturales of this pueblo have no [or very few] … houses [in the población] but continue to live [near their] fields, [a practice] which is gravely prejudicial to the common spiritual and civil good. Because of this they miss many days of fiesta, [fail] to attend Mass and [to learn and expound] the Doctrina Christiana. Furthermore, those families which have children but do not live in the [población] do not send their children to school, and they have tumbled [into a life] without polity [and] without rational practice, being contrary to the encouragement and close communication from and

que nuevos accidents que se han ofrecido y noticias individuales que han tenido los Ministros de Justicia de su Magestad que residian en esta ciudad en que le dan cuenta por extensor de lo que se obra en ordena los ministerios de todas las Religiones como me la han dado a mi en particular (por la merced que me hacen) que es advertir en los excesos que ha habido en los castigos de los indios y repartimientos que se han hecho con titulo de las obras, de todo lo cual tienen individual noticia. Por tanto mando a todos VVCC que por ningun pretext, ninguno de los Religiosos de nuestra obediencia castigue a ningun indio en mas de doce azotes en caso que la culpa lo merezca y por ningun caso ni acontecimiento pase de ahi, y de ser la culpa de esta dicha pena sean remitidos a los ministros de justicia de dichos pueblos para que segun sus costumbres sean castigadas poniendoles las penas que merecen, pues nosotros no podemos castigar como Jueces sino como Padres y aunque la constitucion admite ad summum veinticinco azotes en Culpa grave por las causas que tengo referidos, conviene minorarlos por ser necesario al buen gobierno de esta Provincia con advertencia que cualquiera que exceda de dicho número será castigado y corregido con el mismo exceso sin que le valga ninguna exencion.”

54 “The Spanish Cortes decreed, on September 8, 1813, that the Indian, along with all other men, could not be punished by whipping. On July 4, 1833, Father Francisco Garcia Diego y Moreno forbade the missionaries of his jurisdiction in California to emply this form of punishment on recalcitrant neophytes. In his view at this time, whipping had outlived whatever usefulness it may once have had and was contrary to the basic principles of pedagogy.” Francis F. Guest, O.F.M., “Junipero Serra and His Approach to the Indians,” Southern California Quarterly, 67:3 (Fall 1985), 223-261; here, 255. I do not know if or when such suppression took place in the Philippines.

55 AFIO 90/14. Los Baños. Mandato del Oidor y Visitador de La Laguna, para que todos los tributantes del pueblo de los Baños formen o construyan sus casas en el pueblo. Lilio, 25 November 1696, 2ff., ms., original, mal estado. I will speak to questions of dispersion and tribute collection later in this monograph.

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with the pueblo priest. Moreover, … by living [there] many die without the sacraments, having passed their lives in continuous drunkenness, illicit sexual unions, and other vices. [These they can indulge in] while far away from the parish priest, who cannot leave off from his duties in the [población] and who also lacks precise knowledge of such crimes and bad customs … because of the tendency to hide them from him. … I am also informed that there are many vagabonds and persons living here who [in fact] are registered for the tribute in other pueblos living here …

He continues by specifying the punitive consequences unless designated changes occur:

For all of these reasons I order … that the naturales of this pueblo, under penalty of two months’ imprisonment and 100 lashes if they do not comply—and another 100 lashes and six months suspension from office to the gobernadorcillo if he does not implement this order—that all will build houses in the [población] and establish streets as in the other pueblos… and that all children … will be sent to learn the Doctrina Christiana and go to school.

All were subject to the penalty, no matter social rank or tax category, using both the pre-Conquest and the Spanish colonial terms for social rank:

There will be no distinction made between Chinese or mestizos, the principales and Maguinoos and the timagues and common folk, with punishment for non-compliance for the first time 25 lashes in the pillory …

Moral infractions are also proscribed and under certain circumstances even women were to receive the lash:

In addition the gobernadorcillo, subject to penalty as before, is not to permit in this pueblo gambling, nor drunkenness, nor the sale of alcohol … Nor is he to permit in this pueblo illicit friendships, punishing the woman the first time by putting her in an honorable house where she is to work for a month for her sustenance … [Second and third offenses lead to greater penalties, with the third case leading to loss of hair for both [the man and the woman], one hundred lashes to the man and fifteen to the woman, and exile from the pueblo for scandalous behavior. ….

Franciscans too could be stern in their expectations, if not as severe in their punishments, as seen in this 1703 source (used in part earlier), which speaks to closing the church doors after

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parishioners have gathered for the obligatory Mass and lays out punishment for unexcused absence:56

On fiesta days parishioners are required to attend Mass. Priest must be extra careful to close the door of the church in order to check on attendance at Mass. Use the Padrón [pueblo census, used for tax and church obligations] and take roll, noting those who are absent. The [fiscal] celador will then verify if the absence is due to illness, and if not the person will be brought to the priest. If after two such occasions with remonstrances by the priest the person fails to attend Mass one more time, that person will be punished with a dozen azotes. These lashes are to be administered on the person at the door of the church or … rectory …. Attendance at Mass is mandatory except for those … who alternate with others to guard their homes … Saturdays and Sundays the young girls and [young men] must be in church saying their prayers and reciting the Doctrina Christiana. At Mass they will each in turn recite the rosary. Attendance will be checked according to the Padrón, and if they are absent without good reason they will be punished, girls by the Maestra and boys by the priest.

Also from 1703, we learn of an anonymous Franciscan who spoke from personal experience in ordering the whip applied, “only six lashes:”57

There is no doubt that punishment stimulates more than talent. It is boththe doctor and the wise teacher when used frequently to help keep us on the correct road. I gave only six lashes to an indio houseboy who hadfailed to come to Mass on festive days, and that was sufficient becausehe came every day thereafter.

In 1789 a Franciscan Provincial expressed concern over what he saw as “cruelty” in the punishment of parishioners:58

56 Fondo Franciscano, Biblioteca Nacional del Museo de Antropología e Historia, Vol. 160, ff. 16-38v: “Informe, a petición de fray Agustin de Madrid, sobre la Buena administración de las doctrinas Franciscanas en Filipinas (1703),” f. 17.

57 AFIO 68/8. Instrucciones a nuestros misioneros acerca de la predicación y confesión de los indios. Ms. anónimo. 1703, f. 14.

58 AFIO 79/32. Fr. Juan de la Mata, Provincial, Patente. Candelario, Dilao, 8 August 1789, f. 8. My translation is a bit loose. The Spanish reads: La crueldad con que algunos castigan a los Naturales ya por si, ya por otros me sirve de muchissima pena afliccion y desconsuelo; y assi los encargo la enmienda, y que se regulen a lo que previenen los estatutos. Deven entender los tales, que no hay ningun derecho, que los conceda semejante autoridad; y que solo como Padres pueden con moderacion castigar los defectos, y que averiguare esto con particular cuidado; ya hé dicho del modo con que el buen Ministro puede hacer fruto en su Pueblo.

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The cruelty with which some punish the Naturales causes me great discomfort and affliction. I therefore charge you to correct your practice as regulated and set forth in the Constitutions. … only with moderation are priests allowed to punish poor behavior, and be very careful in apportioning such punishment. Only in this way can a good priest cultivate a good harvest in the pueblo.

Undoubtedly the prevailing culture of pedagogical punishment played a role. Other factors might have been the psychology of the priest, the colonial context, and the behavior and manner of the Filipino. One Franciscan in 1774 was clear that he wanted less freedom for the Filipino and more punishment, but that he was not advocating punishment at any time and without cause.59

Another factor perhaps used to justify public lashings for failures to attend to the obligations and behavior patterns expected of Roman Catholic Christian was what appears to have been the prevalent view by Spanish Franciscans that their Filipino parishioners fundamentally were children, whatever their age or official standing: “… in my experience the Cavezas de Barangay, officials, and gobernadorcillos all are children in how they work and behave, and if one wants that they do well it has to be from fear and punishment.”60 As children they needed to be cajoled, admonished, and paternalistically corrected. It is true that within the Mass itself, all believers in their creed, Filipino or Spaniard, are fundamentally children in the eyes of their god. This is a credit to the inclusiveness of their world religion on the one hand and a testimony to the ability of a religion to transcend social conventions and bigotry when dealing with the mysteries of belief and ritualized behavior on the other. Throughout the Mass, except for the rituals reserved to the priest (who in the Franciscan parishes was almost always a Spaniard), and the bias towards males fundamental in Roman Catholic practice, Filipino assistants were numerous and active.

Outside of the Mass, though, adults are not children, except in the colonial context of ruler over the ruled. Franciscan records repeatedly speak of Filipino parishioners in condescending and paternalistic ways. Their written views seem to be more than simply what might be expected by those representing very demanding spiritual and ethical standards in a lay

59 AFIO 8/2, Informe de varios Religiosos a nuestro Provincial y de este al Gobernador General de Filipinas … sobre malhechores y trastornos ocurridos en el Archipiélago, Mss., 1774; here, 12 July 1774, f. 19, by P. Fr. Miguel de Brihuega: “Menos livertad, y mas Castigo … No es decir por esto, que se castiguen a todas horas, y sin Culpa.”

60 AFIO 8/2, Informe de varios Religiosos a nuestro Provincial y de este al Gobernador General de Filipinas … sobre malhechores y trastornos ocurridos en el Archipiélago, Mss., 1774; here, 12 July 1774, f. 19v, by P. Fr. Miguel de Brihuega, who would have had fifteen years’ worth of experience in the Islands at this point: “… por la experiencia que tengo, es que Cavezas de Barangay, oficiales y Capitanes todos son niños en su modo de obrar y proceder; y si han de hacer algo Bueno, hadecer [sic] por el temor y Castigo.”

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population. Other colonial regions under Spanish rule saw the same outlook, for instance in Yucatan (first three quotations) and in California, both areas with Franciscan priests:61

… the friars came to agree that the Indians were as children. The identification defined the friars’ role. They would be as fathers to their Indian charges, protecting, teaching, and where necessary chastising them.

As children, Indians were to be punished as children. … Their childhood was not a stage but a state: for them, tutelage was to be permanent. ….

…whimpering under the lash, men are made children again.62

As is commonly known, Spanish law made the missionaries the legal guardians of their Indian converts. In virtue of their conversion and baptism, the neophytes became the wards of the friars. The padres had the same responsibilities toward their missionized Indians as Spanish parents were thought to have, in the Spanish theology of the eighteenth century, toward their children.63

Franciscans in the Philippines also were explicit with their views, remarkably similar to the ones just quoted. Balquiedra notes that “As padres the missionaries treated the Filipino Indios re-settled in pueblos as ‘minors’ or ‘big children’.” The example he begins with is from 1707, where the Spanish Franciscan P. Fr. Francisco de Santa Ines observed:64

61 This view was, of course, not unique to the Philippines nor to the Franciscans. Constantino Bayle, S.J., makes the generalization even more explicit and finds it even in the administrative code of the Spanish government: “No debe olvidarse lo que forma el punto de partida de las Leyes de Indias, y lo que a una, sin excepción, declaran cuantos con indios trataron, los curas, los misioneros; que el indigena siempre es niño; niño grande en la irreflexión, en la inconstancia, en el aprender y olvidar, en guiarse por la costumbre o el instinto más que por el entendimiento, en la preponderancia de la vida sensual sobre la racional” (Expansión Misional de España (Barcelona: Editorial Labor, S.A., 1936), 113).

62 Inga Clendinnen, “Disciplining the Indians: Franciscan Ideology and Missionary Violence in Sixteenth-Century Yucatan,” Past and Present, 94 (February 1982), 27-48; here, 41, 43, and 46.

63 Francis F. Guest, O.F.M., “Junípero Serra and His Approach to the Indians,” Southern California Quarterly, 67:3 (Fall 1985), 223-261; here, 227-229.

64 The original is provided by Balquiedra on page 624, note 11. He gives a partial translation on pp. 96-97, and I have added the translation in italics. The original source is from AFIO 48/6, P. Francisco Santa Ines, Escrito sobre las Visitas de las Doctinas que se intent en el año 1707. Ms., 6ff., 1707. Another example Balquiedra noted was from much later, from a Franciscan manual published in 1886 where “the author advised the newcomers in the Philippines: ‘Es necesario de toda necesidad que el religiosos destinado a ejercer la cura de almas aqui en Filipinas comprenda desde luego, y se haga cargo de que, los que han de ser feligreses suyos, son unos niños grandes, en los que hallara perfectamente amalgamento todas las impertinencies, molestias e inconsecurencias propias de la infancia, con la sensatez, sagacidad, rectitude de juicio, o critirio y hasta la astucia adherents, por lo común, a la edad viril o Madura.” Balquiedra, 652n122, citing L. Bustamante, Instrucciones a los jóvenes franciscanos (Manila: 1886), 29.

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… the Naturales are [best regarded] as children [parbulos], not only in [matters of faith] but also in … talent and ability. That is why they, evenafter more than one hundred years of Christianity [in] these islands, [they] still could not be on an equal footing with other Christian settlements….

Examples of this point of view exist throughout the documentary record.

To view the adult parishioners in any lowland parish in the eighteenth century as novices in Christianity would seem peculiar. To treat all parishioners as children is absurd without some acknowledgment of racism and the colonial context coloring Franciscan and other Spanish views of Filipinos. Many of the parishioners were adult women and men, undoubtedly with a good number older than most of the Franciscan priests who came to the Islands from Spain. To slap Filipinos and to order Filipinos to be lashed for violating rules of their god and their king adds shadows to the ideal view of the church and its rites sketched earlier.

The issues and charges are delicate. I do not want to demonize the priests in the colonial Philippines in general nor the Franciscans in particular. I do not wish to be unfair or perceived as such. I also do not wish to ignore language and patterns of behavior by these priests that seem to reflect views of Filipinos that (in my eyes) are prejudiced.

It also seems straightforward the priests were not just representing their religion through the pueblo church. They were also acting as colonial agents of the Spanish imperial government. The Spanish Franciscans signed up to be missionaries in the Islands. The only way they could do so was to agree to government subsidies, transport, administrative duties, and some supervision by civil authority. A Spanish priest in the Philippines might easily have argued that he had to maintain and increase Filipino fidelity to what was seen as the only path to immortal salvation. Since the only way to minister to Filipinos half a world away from Spain was to sign up with the imperial government of Spain, what else, then, could one do but become a priest in service to “both majesties”? Priests and officials attempted literally to whip parishioners and subjects into a colonized mold through punishments enforced against Filipinos who were seen as having violated god’s laws, the church’s proscriptions, and civil authority.

Filipinos, though, were not passive recipients and obedient servants to the rules, expectations, demands, and actions demanded of them. Some participated as civil and religious officials. Others acquiesced in large part. Large numbers of Filipinos appear to have avoided full compliance with imperial and religious demands. Probably to some degree all Filipinos had mental or physical ways to live their own lives, beliefs, actions, and aspirations with some autonomy. In the following chapters I will try to evoke some of the mechanisms and content of their actions and beliefs and how they might have strived for and possibly attained a less colonized existence.

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But Could they Hear the bells? Dispersion and Irregular Contact with the Priest

The pueblo was not a town or city but more of a municipal district. Within the district was the ostensible center, the población, which contained the church. Around it were other settlements, from visitas to barrios to sitios and rancherías. Not every resident of the pueblo lived in the población, near the church and the priest. Those who lived away from the población, in the visitas and so forth, did not necessarily get to church every Sunday. Those living away from the población were usually not available for regular and full participation in church-centered activities, from school for their children to daily, weekly, and seasonal church-sponsored events. This is a significant qualification to the church-centered view of the pueblo described throughout the first chapter and partially in the second chapter.

The Spanish colonial government and the missionary priests tried for a third of a millennium to congregate Filipinos into a compact settlement clustered around the church in the población. The government wanted to do so to facilitate tribute collection, mustering of victims for forced labor, and easy access for forced requisitions of products. The clergy wanted to do so in order to more thoroughly supervise religious beliefs and practices and to root out actions and ceremonies they felt were incompatible with Christianity. As colonial agents and often the only Spaniards in the pueblos, clergy repeatedly tried to attract Filipinos to the población, to encourage or compel them to leave their visitas, barrios, and rancherías and to live “under the bells” of the pueblo church. In 1783 the Spanish provincial governor of Nueva Cáceres said the task of such “congregation involves much work and tact.” Nonetheless, if that work of congregation were carried out, “it would be a second Conquista, even more glorious than the first one, because his royal majesty loses many tributes due to the large number of individuals dispersed along the beaches and in the mountains as well as hidden in the shelter of so many Visitas.”65

Most observers agree that the Spanish failed in their efforts to impose universal nucleation on Filipino patterns of settlement in the Spanish Philippines. This failure is quite apparent in the Franciscan areas of the colonial realm, although probably not radically more so than in most other areas. I will argue that the colonial failure to compel Filipinos to move from their habitual residence patterns to more nucleated and controlled settlements gives us a great

65 PNA, Ereccion de Pueblos, Camarines Sur, 1781-1783. 1781-1783: Espediente formado por mandado del Superior Gobierno para que los dos Alcaldes mayors de Camarines y Albay informen sobre lo representado por el M. R. P. Provincial de la Provincia de San Gregorio, sobre las visitas de los pueblos efectuado por D. Juan del Castillo Negrete Alcalde mayor de esta de Camarines quien lo remite al de Albay, f. 31v.

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insight into Filipino life and thought. Spaniards had an ideological basis to their colonial attempts to enforce congregation in and around the población, along with the practical reasons mentioned above. There were practical reasons for Filipino resistance—location near fields and easy access to fishing areas perhaps most importantly; but that there may very well have been ideological reasons that reveal Filipino preferences and priorities.

We will begin with Spanish views and efforts in order to sketch the dimensions of Filipino responses. The Spanish verb reducirse and the associated noun reducción describe a set of Spanish policies that the rulers tried to apply throughout their colonial empire. The literature sometimes talks of “reducing” or “to reduce” colonial subjects to nucleated populations in and around the church. I prefer the verb “to congregate,” since to say “to reduce” would be to misunderstand the Spanish verb reducirse and to perpetuate as well as perpetrate a false cognate. The policies behind congregation efforts were off-shoots of Spanish ideological assumptions about the nature of humanity and what constituted civilization.

Among these assumptions was a view distinguishing the civilized person from the uncivilized one. Working from the Latin root civilis we find the concept had multiple meanings and shadings regarding city, city-dwelling, residing in community, citizen, and quality of life or person. It is somewhat similar to the word “civilized” in English. However, in English, there appears to be more emphasis on quality rather than place of residence or on the type of community in which one dwells. Associated with these concepts is the further proscribed linkage in the Iberian belief between being civilized and residence in a polity or policía. A 2002 study shows the mix of meanings within this residential and ideological set of assumptions quite well:66

Policía, in sum, implied all of the benefits that accrued from urban life:law, order, morality, and religion. Policía, moreover, lay at the very core of the empire that Spaniards sought to establish in the New World, an empire which, if examined from a purely jurisdictional perspective, was little more than an “empire of towns,” each endowed, in theory at least, with “Buena policía.”

For a Spaniard, heirs of this Roman and Greek conception of proper place and style of life, a human not only possessed reason but also should manifest “social, political or civil” structures and behavior. Conversely, only barbarians could live “without an organized community, without towns and society.”67 Given the assumption that civilized was better than

66 Richard L. Kagan, “Cartography and Community in the Hispanic World,” in Visions of Community in the Pre-Modern World (Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 2002), 154.

67 Juan de Solórzano y Pereyra, Politica Indiana (Madrid and Buenos Aires: Compañía Ibero-Americana, 1930; first published in 1647, from translations of Latin editions of 1629 and 1639), v. 1, 372, #2; 373, #10; and passim. Also see John Leddy Phelan, The Hispanization of the Philippines: Spanish Aims and Filipino Responses, 1565-1700 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1959), 44.

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uncivilized, and the latter were recognized through their choices of settlement patterns, the Spanish in the colonies determined to “civilize” those who lived in dispersed settlements, distant from the church and the priest. Humans properly existed in community. Living otherwise was contrary to their best interests. Benefits of such community under closer Spanish rule and supervision would benefit the colonized:68

… the natives, for their own advantages and comfort should live together in the pueblos, and not scattered around the hills and mountains, deprived of all material and spiritual benefit, without the help of the Ministros, and of the natural intercourse that there must be, by law of nature, among men.

It was self-evident to the Spaniards that force must be used to compel those sin policía, living outside of the polity, far away from the población, to live like humans:69

When one knows that some people, because of lack of capacity, know neither how to measure nor embrace what is proposed for their own good, it is licit for those in your charge to direct and make them enter along the road they have refused.

According to the Spanish, such a policy was for the benefit of the uncivilized. Today we are very much aware of the benefits that the colonizers and priests would accrue from a more densely congregated population, with more supervision, more surplus, a subject people more readily taxed and mobilized for imperial goals.

Throughout the Franciscan sources we find statement after statement based on the ideological assumptions sketched previously—usually coupled with observations deploring Filipino persistence in living away from the church and the población. Clearly what was then seen as a problem for the imperial rulers and the colonial priests should, for us, be seen as recognition that Fiipino priorities were often different. Filipinos through the centuries successfully pursued settlement choices in spite of government and church pressures to change. Ultimately the Spanish failed to successfully congregate the bulk of Filipinos “under the bells.” John Phelan called the results of Spanish pressure and Filipino resistance regarding congregation around the church and in the población a “compromise.”70 I think that the term “compromise” underestimates the degree of Filipino success and the significance of the Spanish defeat.

68 Leyes de Indias, lib. 60, tit. 30, 1a, from Eladio Neira, Conversion Methodology in the Philippines (1565-1665) (Manila: University of Santo Tomas Press, 1966), 34; as cited in Balquiedra, 588n22, translation by Neira and quoted in Balquiedra, 27.

69 Balquiedra, 268, citing Chapter 10, paragraph 1, of the Baculo.

70 Phelan, The Hispanization of the Philippines, 47, 49, and 155.

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Those residing in the población tended to belong to the upper class and by virtue of residence and social standing had the most access to education, church ceremonies, and political office (for males only). They also tended to live the farthest from crop lands and be the most subject to supervision and correction by priest and representatives of the Spanish colonial government. From this we find the suggestion both of wealth (others worked their lands) and the reasons why many Filipinos chose to live away from the población—closer to their crop lands and fishing areas. Of course, with the choice to live away from the Spanish-defined center, there was also a consequent loss of access to the perquisites of education and political or social influence that came with colonial rule through the población.

The Spanish knew, of course, that ready access to and supervision over cultivated fields and growing crops was a necessity for Filipino agriculturists. However, with their views regarding policía and the civilized life, they consistently stressed not Filipino constraints but Filipino willfulness. Instead of discussing field access and protection of crops from wild pigs, the documents tended to stress an alleged defect in the very nature of the Filipino and the desire by the colonized to resist imperial government and church demands. Thus, for instance, P. Fr. Tomas Marti quoted a government decree regarding the pueblo of Pandi:71

Insofar as within the area of the pueblos there are residents of other pueblos living for much of the year in houses and with fields and gardens … with no subjection to civil authority nor to spiritual; and insofar as many [others] live far away from settled areas and encourage and commit infamous acts while hidden [by] tribute-payers who act as go-betweens with these evil folk, against [the interests of] both majesties, for these reasons … it is hereby ordered that you subjugate and enter these people on the padrón.

Or to return to the civil official’s strictures from 1696 regarding Los Baños quoted at length in the preceding chapter:72

they have tumbled [into a life] without polity [and] without rational practice, being contrary to the encouragement and close communication from and with the pueblo priest. Moreover, … by living [there] many die without the sacraments, having passed their lives in continuous drunkenness, illicit sexual unions, and other vices. [These they can indulge in] while

71 AFIO 96/19. Fr. Tomas Marti, Oficio del Gobierno pidiendo se mande empadronar a los naturales que no teniendo morada fija pasan temporadas en el pueblo. Santa Maria de Bulacan, Pandi, sin fecha. P. Tomas was the parish priest of Pandi in 1805. It is reasonable to assume that this manuscript dates from about then.

72 AFIO 90/14. Los Baños. Mandato del Oidor y Visitador de La Laguna, para que todos los tributantes del pueblo de los Baños formen o construyan sus casas en el pueblo. Lilio, 25 November 1696, 2ff., ms., original, mal estado.

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far away from the parish priest, who cannot leave off from his duties in the [población] and who also lacks precise knowledge of such crimes and bad customs … because of the tendency to hide them from him.

How much dispersion in Franciscan parishes was there in the eighteenth century? Not surprisingly, statistics are hard to find and undoubtedly imprecise. After all, if officially counted one might be subject to governmental and clerical demands. Nonetheless, we do have impressionistic statements by Franciscans in a variety of areas, especially in regards to attendance at Mass. While not precise, Mass attendance is a useful indicator. It adds depth to the ideal vision of a docile, colonial population flocking to church on Sundays and fiesta days. How common was it that Filipinos regularly skipped Mass in spite of Franciscan efforts to compel or encourage it? Here’s a condensed summary from the Camarines and Albay in the early 1780s, showing a mixed pattern of Filipino choices:73

Bombon, whose population living in a visita ¼th of an hour from the población “hear Mass, confess, and comply with their Christian obligations” along with those in the población.

Buhi, which has a visita five hours away from the población. “Its residents … scarcely hear Mass at all through the year, but they do confess and take communion once a year.” Another visita, about three hours away by water, has residents who regular attend Mass and fulfill their other obligations.

Bula, has a visita one hour away by oar or ¾th of an hour by land, whose residents “comply with their Christian obligations to hear Mass and confess as expected.”

Calabagnan—the Filipinos here “live as they want and do not comply with their obligations”One visita, 4.5 hours away, is described as having residents who are “contentious and evil,” with a tendency to flee to Mount Isarog.

Camalig—three visitas named, two of which (only a few hours walk from the población) haveresidents who “seldom hear Mass” but do comply with their annual obligations to the church

Camaligan—all residents comply “with all their Christian obligations promptly”Canaman—“In the sitios and visita there are many hidden places with Bagamundos74 who are

little devoted regarding Mass attendance, they confess and take communion at Easter, and only learn the Doctrina Cristiana by whipping [y la Doctrina Christiana sin azotes no se aprendez]

Casiguran has two visitas mentioned. The one only ¼th of an hour away from the población has

73 PNA, Ereccion de Pueblos, Camarines Sur, 1781-1783: 1781-83, Espediente formado por mandado del Superior Gobierno para que los dos Alcaldes mayors de Camarines y Albay informen sobre lo representado por el M. R. P. Provincia de San Gregorio, sobre las visitas de los pueblos efectuado por D. Juan del Castillo Negrete Alcalde mayor de esta de Camarines quien lo remite al de Albay, 52ff. I have re-arranged and consolidated the relevant information; and omitted entries that did not speak to the point discussed in this part of this monograph.

74 Vagabundos, literally vagabonds, Filipinos registered in other pueblos but resident here.

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a mixed response to fulfillment of obligations—others one has to look for “several times”in order to get them to comply. The other visita, considerably farther away, has a population that mainly does not hear Mass

Guinobatan, with four visitas from ½ to 2 ½ hours away were quite good in attending Mass and attending to their obligations, albeit with some qualifications

Ligmanan, with two visitas mentioned, one of which (the other had no commentary) had residents who “complied with their Christian obligations and paid their tribute to the king [pues cumplen con las obligaciones de Christianos tributan al Rey]

Libon, with two visitas mentioned, one two hours away by land and the other three hours away by water. The first has residents who “never come to Mass, nor hear the word of god, have forgotten all their Christian obligations and most are ignorant of the Doctrina Cristiana, and there is no unmarried woman without two or more children [jamas vienen a misa, ni oyen la Palabra de Dios, estan olvidados de todas las obligaciones Cristianas a mas de ignorer la doctrina … y no haber soltera que no tenga dos, o mas hijos]. The other visita’s residents, “while they usually come to Mass live with equal liberty” and have as well the same situation regarding unmarried mothers.

Ligao, with about 1200 families only has about 800 adults who come to Mass, “it’s a shame”One visita, less than a mile away, has 80 households but only 38 actually live in the visita, living instead scattered in the hills “as if they were animals.” About 25 usually come to Mass, only ten or less of the children attend school (and only through pressure from the priest). Wickedness is common here. Another visita has residents who “never hear Mass, nor make their Confession, nor pay tribute.” Another visita with 80 tributes, but only 24 of whom actually live in the visita, is notable for its wicked folk that neither “make their Confession nor comply with any precept of the Church.” Yet another visita, ½ a day from the población, is made up of 40 families, only half of whom live in the visita, and the priest seldom visits them.

Milaor, three visitas and two sitios, whose populations is very dispersed but with good attendance at Mass and fiestas

Minalabag, two visitas, one of which (one hour away) has residents who seldom hear Mass and are characterized as dissolute and depraved folks [Sus havitantes oyen Missa mui pocos … Libertinaje, y Vicios …]. Very few of the other visita’s residents, 3 ½ hours away by water, hear Mass.

Oas, with four visitas, has folks living away from the población, whose attendance at Mass andfulfillment of Christian obligations is mixed (average to poor). One visita, two hours away, is notable for its wickedness and drunkenness, and one visita is particularly notablefor its dispersed population.

Polangui, with five visitas. One visita, 4 hours from the población, is notable for having few from there who attend Mass or whose children come to school.

Quipayo has residents who are notable for hearing Mass only once a year, even less taking annual Confession or communion. “As far as I can tell, they live more by the law that they want than by any other” [Y en mi Corto Juisio viven mas en la Ley que quieren, que

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otra cosa].

Seventeen pueblos are listed here—I only noted the ones which gave some data regarding church participation. Six had good adherence to church expectations, two were okay or mixed, and nine pueblos had visita populations who were seen as poorly attending to expectations and behaviors. There was some correlation between distance and irregular attendance to church obligations in the población, but that was not always the case. Certainly the closer you were to the church the easier it would be to attend for Mass and other obligations regardless of weather, but disinclination to do so seemed to have been more important:

“the Yndios live as they please and do not comply with their obligations” (Calabagnan), “some neither attend Mass, nor make their Confession, nor pay the tribute” (Ligao), “they want to hide in some of the rancherias and live as they wish” (Oas) “the people are little inclined to hear Mass, to confess and take communion at Lent.

Without the scourge they would not learn the Christian doctrine” (Canaman) “As far as I can tell, they live more by the law that they want than by any other”

(Quipayo)

The other option was for the priest to go out to the population rather than expecting them to come to him. The very word visita connotes the visiting place for a priest to meet with some of the dispersed population, to say Mass, hear confessions, administer baptism and other rites. By and large, given the dispersion of the population, if the priest wished to see all of his parishioners regularly, he would have to go to them. The Jesuit P. Francisco Ignacio Alzina wrote about his outreach efforts in seventeenth-century Samar:75

Every father has under his care at least two towns; some have three, othersfour and even five … Thus we are always on the move, carrying our houseson our backs like tortoises, for wherever the missionary goes he must bringwith him his domestic effects, and in many places his church equipment too ….

Even with years of efforts to reach and congregate Filipinos around the church, by the end of the 19th century and after some 300 years of Catholic missionizing by Jesuits, Augustinians, and Franciscans, for Samar (to use one example): about 49% of the population known to the Spanish lived in the poblaciones at that time, while about 15% lived from 3 to 6 miles from the poblaciones, and about 22% lived more than 6 miles from the poblaciones.76 Filipinos in Samar and elsewhere in the colony resisted congregation. Pressure and exhortations by the priest were

75 Quotation and translation taken from Horacio de la Costa, S.J., The Jesuits in the Philippines: 1581-1768 (Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1967), 458.

76 Cruikshank, Spanish Franciscans in the Colonial Philippines, v. 1, 158 and 158n65.

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only marginally successful against this Filipino choice to live closer to their fields. As the commentary for Quipayo stated earlier: “As far as I can tell, [Filipinos] live more by the law that they want than by any other”

Returning to the early 1780s source used earlier,77 one can sketch out some distances for visitas from their poblaciones in Camarines Sur and Albay. The results understate dispersion since the data generally do not include distances of barrios, sitios, and rancherias. The results are useful nonetheless:

Bao [sic], sharing a priest with Bula, one visita, .25 hour away from the Bao poblaciónBombon, one visita a bit more than .25 hour from the poblaciónBuhi, one visita 5 hours away by road, another 3 hours away by waterBulla [sic], one visita 1 hour away by rowingCalabagnan, one visita 300 steps from the church, another 4.5 hours by roadCamalig, one visita 1 legua,78 one a bit less, and one less than .25 leguaCamaligan, two .25 hour by road, another 1.5 hour by roadCanaman, described as having many sitios and a visita with many bagamundos,

with one barrio [the sound of?] “a musket shot to the east,”, a sitio .75 hour to the north, and a sitio 1 hour by road to the south

Casiguran, one visita .25 hour away, another half a day to a day by road and waterGuinobatan, four visitas, .5, 1.5, 2, and 2.5 hours awayIriga, two visitas, “two shots of a musket” awayLibgnanan [sic], one visita a bit more than half a day away, another 3 hours awayLibon, one two hours away by road, another 3 hours away by waterLigao, a bit more than .25 legua away, but of the 80 tributos enteros79 only 38 lived in the

visita itself; another was .5 legua by road, 80 tributos enteros but only 24 actually live in the visita itself; another visita with 80 tributos enteros, perhaps

77 PNA, Ereccion de Pueblos, Camarines Sur, 1781-1783: 1781-83, Espediente formado por mandado del Superior Gobierno para que los dos Alcaldes mayors de Camarines y Albay informen sobre lo representado por el M. R. P. Provincia de San Gregorio, sobre las visitas de los pueblos efectuado por D. Juan del Castillo Negrete Alcalde mayor de esta de Camarines quien lo remite al de Albay, 52ff. I have again re-arranged and consolidated the relevant information;.

78 The legua probably was around 2.6 miles in length. Units of measurement used in the Philippines before the twentieth century are notoriously difficult to confidently convert to contemporary units. The Franciscan writer Huerta says that a legua was the distance a person could walk in an hour [Por una legua se entenderá lo que suele caminar un hombre en el espacio de una hora], which would probably mean 2.5 to 3 miles. The reference from Huerta is from Félix de Huerta, O.F.M., Estado geográfico, topográfico, estadístico, histórico-religioso de la santa y apostólica Provincia de San Gregorio Magno, de religiosos Menores Descalzos de la Regular y más estrecha Observancia de N. S. P. S. Francisco en las islas Filipinas; comprende el número de religiosos, conventos, pueblos, situación de estos, años de su fundación, tributos, almas, producciones, industrias, casos especiales de su administración spiritual, en el archipiélago Filipino, desde su fundación en el año de 1577 hasta el de 1865 ( 2nd ed. Binondo: M. Sánchez, 1865), in the Advertencias at the start of the volume [p. 4].79 The phrase tributos enteros refers to a tribute tax category, roughly equivalent to one married couple.

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an hour away (manuscript copy is difficult to decipher here), with only 24actually living in the visita; and another visita, half a day by road, with 20 of 40 tributos enteros actually living in the visita; and one other visita with 18 of 25 tributos enteros living there, about 1.5 hour by road from the población

Magarao, with no visitas, “the only one in the province”Milaor, three visitas, all about half an hour by road from the poblaciónMinalabag, one visita is an hour away by land or water; another 3.5 hours away, by waterNabua, one visita, 200 steps from the churchNaga, one practically in the población; and another two hours awayOas, two visitas, each about 2 hours by road; two others about 1 hour away eachPolangui, one next to the población, two others an hour away, each; and two other

visitas, 3 and 4 hours away Quipayo, one visita, one days’ travel away by land or water

In summary, 22 pueblos mentioned, one with no visitas at all and the following descriptions forthe other named visitas or other settlements:

11 less than one hour away 3 close, distance measured by musket shot ?sound

9 less than one legua away15 one to two hours away 9 two hours to half a day away 3 more than half a day’s trip away

Of the 45 named settlements outside of the población, 23 are about an hour or less away, the rest farther, with three taking more than half a day to reach, weather permitting.

Weather conditions and health would have been important considerations for travel, whether for Filipino lay people or for priests. Focusing just on priests for now, it is obvious that priests were human, they were not supermen, they too got sick or discouraged, weather affected their travels, duties in the población could be more pressing, and so forth. We see this clearly in an essay Norman Owen wrote in 1987:80

During the eight and one half months of [a specific Franciscan’s] ministryin Tigaon he baptized at least 214 persons, an average of 25 per month, and married at least 41 couples, an average of nearly 5 per month. By contrast, over the previous three and a half years and the succeeding twenty years … fewer than two baptisms a month were performed on the average, with one marriage celebrated every two months or so; thus Fr. Perciva was ten times more active in these areas than those who preceded and followed him.

80 Norman G. Owen, “Requiem for a Heroic Priest,” in Festschrift in Honor of Dr. Marcelino Foronda, Jr., edited by Emerita S. Quito (Manila: De La Salle University Press, 1987), 244-245.

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This priest’s predecessor and successors married and baptized mainly folks “from the poblacion itself; not one in ten was from the rancherias.”

What about the Filipino pueblo officials? Could they be expected to help the priest congregate residents around the church and compel attendance at Mass and punctually comply with their civic and religious obligations? The ideal picture sketched in Chapter One and part of Chapter Two suggests that they would. The evidence, however, suggests that their behavior was often different from the ideal, motivated by considerations distinct from those of the priest and the king. In the same PNA 1781-83 manuscript source, note the following clerical observations regarding Filipino, pueblo officials:

Magarao’s pueblo officials: none have attended to good administration and well-being of the pueblo, including the spiritual, they are “all busy serving the [provincial governor] and the [Governor-General of the Islands] ….

Milaor, the obligation to attend Mass is lacking among many here, no matterhow I wear myself out calling for the gobernadorcillo to require they attend.

Polangui—“The multitude of officials, rather than remedying [the problem] augments the depravity.”

We find a fuller statement regarding Filipino officials from the same document, this by the Bishop of Nueva Cáceres dated 28 April 1783 (ff. 30-31v):

The multitude of officials, it is obvious, are without any utility whatsoever … They spend the year maintaining their position and work by distributing among themselves those who must pay tribute. These then must work the lands of the pueblo officials so that those officials can spend the work with more decency and display. …this is a hidden government that, while tyrannical, all observe, some from fear and other hopeful that tomorrow they will do the same to others. …it is partly from this that [some run off], hoping to hide themselves or even to found visitas so that they themselves can be officials.

A Franciscan in 1774 observed that pueblo officials regularly hid from the priest those who should pay tribute. If questioned by the priest, these officials would lie and say that the person was no longer resident in the pueblo when in fact he was working on the fields of one or more of the pueblo officials, while of course absent from Confession and Mass so as not to be seen by the priest. This Franciscan estimated that about 100 tributes at least were not paid because of this

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ruse and exploitation by the officials. The writer says that the extortion worked due to fear the ordinary Filipino had of the pueblo officials.81

Let’s move on to the next chapter, not just to explore this “tyrannical” government but also to document other areas of Filipino behavior that did not conform to the ideal picture sketched earlier. In doing so, we can glimpse some of the other reasons behind Filipino assertions of arenas of relative freedom away from strictures of priest and king.

81 AFIO 8/2, Informe de varios Religiosos a nuestro Provincial y de este al Gobernador General de Filipinas … sobre malhechores y trastornos ocurridos en el Archipiélago, Mss., 1774; here, 12 July 1774, ff. 21-22, by P. Fr. Miguel de Brihuega. The figure of 100 tributos could either be per pueblo or (more likely) just for the pueblo where he was then stationed.

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Arenas of Filipino Freedom from Mandated Behavior

In the last chapter we saw that many Filipinos avoided residence in the población, living away from the church and Spanish expectations of “civilized” behavior. We also discovered that Filipino pueblo officials, who might have been expected to help congregate and enforce Spanish clerical and civil regulations were reported to have been lax, even accused of running their own “tyrannical” government while officially serving both majesties. Those observations were from 1783, but we have other observations from elsewhere in the eighteenth century confirming a pattern. Here is the Franciscan P. Fr. Antonio de Luna writing about the pueblo of Nabua in 1772: “… that because of its distance and disorder, it only serves as a refuge for evil doers from other pueblos.” He adds that the pueblo of Bato serves as a place where folks from other pueblos hide and as a consequence do not pay the tribute owed to the king.82 He observed as well Filipinos who worked almost as “slaves for pueblo officials,” paying them a real every week in order to come up with the seven pesos demanded as tribute—when the King only in fact requires five reales” (f. 13v). He went on to mention in passing officials in two pueblos who lived in the población but had Filipinos working on their fields elsewhere, as if they were “encomenderos” (f. 14); and another group who “were occupied in serving the Señor Alcalde maior [provincial governor, a Spaniard]” (f. 16), apparently acting as middlemen in collecting wax, sea slugs (balate), and other coastal and mountain products as tribute or in exchange for cloth (f. 16v).

Filipino pueblo officials seem to have enjoyed remarkable discretion and authority within the Spanish colonial system, avoiding or contravening mandated church and imperial rules seemingly at will as long as they manifested most outward forms and complied with civil exactions from the population. The State’s exactions officially were of three kinds:

an annual tribute, collected from all families registered on the pueblo registry and compiled at Easter under the supervision of the parish priest,

forced sales to the provincial governor and his agents of commodities in need by the imperial state (the bandala); and

forced labor, the polo, involving drafts of male labor, often for several months or longer under difficult or dangerous conditions, particularly in cutting and transporting timber for the construction of galleons.

Filipino pueblo officials were expected to facilitate the collection of tribute, commodities, and labor for the Crown—and, in return, they were exempted from same. As the number of pueblo officials grew, presumably to free friends and allies from these obligations, the burden on others

82 AFIO 92/28, Informe del Obispo de Camarines, Fr. Antonio de Luna, sobre la Real Cédula que manda se predique y enseñe el castellano. Mss., 1755., 1772. Al final se refiere al estado de los pueblos. Ff. 13-13v.

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increased. As long as the pueblo officials could meet their tribute and other quotas, there was room for bribes and considerations for those who wanted to make a side arrangement and escape imperial exactions. Hence the payoffs described earlier.

Not all Filipinos had protectors among the pueblo officials. Their choice was to comply with Spanish government demands or flee. We saw that many fled to other pueblos, perhaps because they had relatives or allies who were pueblo officials there. If they registered there at all, they did so as vagabundos, which is a misleading term since they were not in fact vagabonds but merely unregistered aliens in a pueblo with tribute obligations. If they did not register, such as those seemingly described earlier, they paid nothing and relied on pueblo officials to protect them. If Filipinos chose to flee to flee to the hills, away from life in any pueblo at all, they were then described as remontados, roughly meaning those lowlanders who had been baptized and lived in a pueblo but chose to flee to the mountains rather than comply with church and state. Those who lived in the hills and mountains and had never lived in a pueblo were considered infieles or monteses, either of a highland group such as Igorot or Aeta; or lowlanders who fled for refuge in the highlands. The terms are imprecise, and confusion is added when one recognizes distinct generations and children and grandchildren. Some individuals became ladrones, thieves or bandits.

Nonetheless, the conclusion is inescapable: many Filipinos chose to live away from the población and only occasionally comply with state and church laws, while others fled to live in areas generally beyond the ken of priest and Spanish civil authority. Pueblo officials, though, were knowledgeable about all or most of these individuals, families, and communities. For a consideration they would find ways to maintain their existence secret from priest and provincial governor. It also seems that sometimes pueblo officials used their position to abuse those living outside the población. Here is a case from a 1781 report by the Franciscan P. Fr. Tomás Esbrí, who said that those living in the visita of Pandon about one fourth of a league from the población of Ligao were regularly victimized by Filipino officials from that población:83

… the officials of said visita commonly live in the [población], and whenthey do go to the visita they usually cause a great deal of injustice by taking from some of the poor folk there things needed to live. The [victims] complain to the priest, who complains to the [gobernadorcillo], whocustomarily neither investigates nor does anything else about it.

Sometimes Filipino principal families, whether officials or not, used their preeminence, power, and relative wealth to engage in practices which Franciscan writers described as usurious.

83 PNA, Ereccion de Pueblos, Camarines Sur, 1781-1783: 1781-83, Espediente formado por mandado del Superior Gobierno para que los dos Alcaldes mayors de Camarines y Albay informen sobre lo representado por el M. R. P. Provincia de San Gregorio, sobre las visitas de los pueblos efectuado por D. Juan del Castillo Negrete Alcalde mayor de esta de Camarines quien lo remite al de Albay, 52ff., here f. 7.

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Our best Franciscan source on this topic for the eighteenth century is P. Fr. Francisco Antonio Maceyra, who described the need for money for marriages, tribute, death rites, as well in order “to dress the family with some decency and to provide for it.”84 The Franciscan mentioned two major types of usurious practice, both of which involved sums advanced against collateral which in turn could be lost if the principal as well as interest were not paid off in a specified period of time. The first type of usury he describe was the casonos, where one borrows and then works in the household of the lender. While there one eats and must be clothed, further debts that are added to the principal originally borrowed, so “that the longer one serves the greater the debt, and at the end one has found self a slave for life” (391). The second kind of indebtedness he called sanlang bili but the editor (P. Fr. Lorenzo Pérez) indicated would be better written as San lang bili or Sanlá bili, meaning sale with the option for re-purchase if the debt were paid off within a certain amount of time. With failure to raise the needed principal and accumulated interest, the borrower would lose everything (usually land, coconut palms, etc.), and the buyer would acquire them “for a lower price than legitimate,” lower than purchase if they had been sold on the market (392). Sometimes the borrowers were allowed to use the land pawned, but more commonly they were obligated to seed, maintain, and harvest it as part of the debt.85

The Franciscan reported that the accumulated indebtedness and loss of collateral could result in a type of debt-bondage that could be overwhelming and essentially life-long. Not emphasized in the manuscript but implied is that those who did the loaning were usually principales while those who did the borrowing were usually from the lower parts of society and often lived outside of the población. It appears, though again the manuscript does not mention this, that this activity took place outside of the purview or supervision of the parish priest, though an experienced priest would almost without doubt know it was occurring.

It appears that in fact the parish priest had very little leverage with the principal families of the pueblo. The ideal picture shows the Franciscan parish priest as dominant in church ceremonies and issues of behavior and morality. The manuscripts tell rather a different picture, at least when it comes to disciplining the pueblo officials and leading citizens. For instance, a

84 P. Fr. Lorenzo Pérez, O.F.M., “Informe del P. Francisco Antonio Maceyra sobre varios puntos de los que convendría tratar en el Concilio provincial de Manila,” Archivo Ibero-Americano, 30 (1928), 375-97; here, 394.

85 There are undoubtedly many other forms and types of loans and debt-bondage, but this sounds quite similar to the pacto de retroventa described by Jack Larkin as the major means to acquire lands for sugar cane cultivation. See John A. Larkin, The Pampangans. Colonial Society in a Philippine Province (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), 53-54, 74-76, 211-213, 279, and 281. Also see his “Philippine History Reconsidered: A Socioeconomic Perspective,” The American Historical Review, 87:3 (June 1982), 595-628, where usury is but one of the aspects of the archipelago-wide responses to economic opportunity within the world market from the mid- to late eighteenth century to the present. There is an overview of the pacto de retroventa as well in John N. Schumacher, S.J,, “Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Agrarian Developments in Central Luzon,” in Reflections on Philippine Culture and Society. Festschrift in Honor of William Henry Scott, ed. Jesus T. Peralta (Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2001), 168-202; especially, 186-189.

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Franciscan in the 1780s in the Camarines and Albay suggested that without civil government aid the priests generally had no leverage with leading citizens:86

No one has intervened regarding this principal ]in Calabagnan]and his abominable immunity … [with] his two children born outside of wedlock … and he has never been punished for his adulteries. … I havenot been able to do anything, and while we have complained to the [provincial governor] nothing is done.

Indeed, family and so-called morality issues make up an area of remarkable Filipino divergence from the norms brought by Spanish missionary priests. Some couples formalized their unions in the church, though Norman Owen has found that proportions of women who never married (officially at least) could be significant:87

Marriage in the Philippine generally seem to have been later than it waselsewhere in historical Southeast Asia, with ages at first marriage averagingjust over 20 for brides and two to four years older for grooms. A significantproportion of women—5 to 10 percent in Nagcarlan, 15 to 25 percent inTigaon—apparently never married at all, which suggests a society in whichformal marriage, though normative, was not socially mandatory.

However, if there were a formal marriage, one source suggests that the parents of the young women arranged the marriages and would even resort to force to have their wishes obeyed by their daughters:88

Regarding the sacrament of marriage, there are among los naturales many practices that need to be remedied, changes that only a strong hand can effect. Parents are accustomed to arrange marriages without the daughter knowing

86 PNA, Ereccion de Pueblos, Camarines Sur, 1781-1783: 1781-83, Espediente formado por mandado del Superior Gobierno para que los dos Alcaldes mayors de Camarines y Albay informen sobre lo representado por el M. R. P. Provincia de San Gregorio, sobre las visitas de los pueblos efectuado por D. Juan del Castillo Negrete Alcalde mayor de esta de Camarines quien lo remite al de Albay, 52ff., here f. 3-3v.

87 Norman G. Owen, “Life, Death, and the Sacraments in a Nineteenth-Century Bikol Parish,” in Daniel F. Doeppers and Peter Xenos, eds., Population and History. The Demographic Origins of the Modern Philippines (Madison: Center for Southeast Asian Studies, University of Wisconsin, 1989), 229. The data are from the nineteenth century, but one can provisionally at least project the same patterns to earlier times. A nineteenth-century source for Camarines Sur, Camarines Norte, Albay, and Tayabas, suggests that “an overall average of 16.1% of children known to the priest … were born of unwed parents ….” Bruce Cruikshank, Spanish Franciscans in the Colonial Philippines, 1578-1898 (Hastings, NE: Cornhusker Press, 2003), v. 1, 209.

88 P. Fr. Lorenzo Pérez, O.F.M., “Informe del P. Francisco Antonio Maceyra sobre varios puntos de los que convendría tratar en el Concilio provincial de Manila,” Archivo Ibero-Americano, 30 (1928), 375-97; here, 388-390.

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beforehand, from which stem not unimportant difficulties. Parents sometimes have to use cruel punishments to force their daughters to accept the arranged marriage, and this sometimes brings with it a wretched life, especially if they had not consented voluntarily to their parents’ choice or if they had been in love with another. …

This observation is echoed in a late eighteenth-century source that adds an observation about how thwarted love might find a way, no matter that it goes against the morality of the Church:89

… Many of the women were married against their will, forced by theirparents. Many times, perhaps most of the time, the parents give theirokay to a marriage without consulting at all with their daughters to seeif they are in favor of the groom. In other cases, the daughters have beenin secret contact with one while their parents are arranging for a differentgroom. The parents receive presents and labor in the home or in the fieldfrom the man they have chosen and the daughter … through fear of herparents does not dare to contradict their choice. … [Some of these], afterthe wedding, at the cost of great offense given to God, end up stayingwith the man they loved.

Notwithstanding clerical concerns, the practices that diverged from Roman Catholic norms seem to have continued.

Franciscan sources also mention the seemingly common practice of “groom service,” where the prospective groom had to spend some time and labor in the household and fields of his beloved’s family. The priests were against this because of the opportunity for pre-marital sexual intercourse by the engaged couple. The late eighteenth-century source by P. Fr. Francisco Antonio Maceyra that we have used before describes the practice and the moral dangers he and other priests anticipated:90

89 AFIO 52/32, P. Fr. Casimiro Pitarque, Parecer sobre las dudas de RR.CC. y Acuerdos en orden al casamiento de los Indios. Ms., 4ff. Sobre la Real Pragmatica de 23 marzo 1776. Real Cédula de 7 abril 1778 y Real pragmatic 21 enero 1781. Mss., Baras, 5 octubre 1781, ff. 1v-2. Also see the seventeenth-century Franciscan chronicler P. Fr. Francisco de Santa Inés, Crónica de la Provincia de San Gregorio Magno de Religiosos Descalzos de N. S. P. San Francisco en las Islas Filipinas, China, Japón, etc. (Manila: Tipo Litografía de Chofre y Comp., 1892 (Biblioteca Histórica Filipina)), v. 1, 64-66.

90 P. Fr. Lorenzo Pérez, O.F.M., “Informe del P. Francisco Antonio Maceyra sobre varios puntos de los que convendría tratar en el Concilio provincial de Manila,” Archivo Ibero-Americano, 30 (1928), 375-97; here, 388-389. He also observed (395) that since many Filipino rural houses were small, the family all sleep “next to each other, and visitors as well … from which no few inconveniences and offenses against God” occur.

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They are accustomed in many parts of the island for the young mento serve as a servant in the house of the [betrothed], going in and out withher, going to the fields with her … from which come not a few offenses against God. If in time the young man displeases his future in-laws, they caneasily dismiss him without paying him a thing for all of the work, leavingthe door open then for a new candidate, with the same risks brought aswith the predecessor.

Priestly opposition notwithstanding, the practice seems to have been widespread and Filipinos continued to successfully resist persistent ecclesiastical efforts to eradicate it.

Priests also had concerns with other Filipino practices, most notably drinking and gambling. Here too the representatives of the Roman Catholic church were unable to eradicate what they viewed as vices and occasions for sin. In Samar, the Jesuit Father Ignacio de Alcina observed that rancor and alcohol made a dangerous combination:91

… the padres should never use disrespectful language or even speak to an Indio who is drunk, or worse still with one who is only half drunk, if theywish to avoid dangerous, violent and irreverent attacks upon their persons …When the Indio is drunk he is inclined to commit any disrespectful act whatever and to lose his sense of reverence very easily. This he would ordinarily not dare to do if he were in his right mind … For sometimes an Indio gets himself drunk so that with greater courage and less fear he can do something he would not know how or dare to do if he had all his faculties.

Censorious judgments against drinking and gambling are found regularly in Franciscan reports. Here are characteristic examples, taken from a Franciscan writing from Polo in May 1731, criticizing habitual or excessive card playing:92

… every day there are quarrels and robberies—nothing is safe in thehouses –and every day that there are card players there are fights. Not only

91 Francisco Ignacio de Alcina, S.J., Historia natural del sitio, fertilidad y calidad de las Islas e Indios de Bisayas,” 1668, translated by Dr. Paul Lietz, Book 3, Chapter 22, quoted in Bruce Cruikshank, Samar: 1768-1898 (Manila: Historical Conservation Society, 1985), 46.

92 AFIO AFIO 7/23, Informe de varios religiosos al Provincial y de este al Gobernador sobre juegos de naipes con la Real Cédula sobre lo mismo. Ms., 1731, ff. 18-18v. Also see, though, Doreen G. Fernandez, “A Conversation with Fray Juan de Oliver on Drinking and Drunkenness,” in Jose M. Cruz, S.J., ed., Declaración de la Doctrina Christiana en Idioma Tagalog. Juan de Oliver OFM (+1599) (Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University, 1995), 226-233, where she suggests that this sixteenth-century Franciscan both misunderstood its limits and functions (“… generally social in nature, a community activity governed by mores and manners, and aimed not at individual self-indulgence but at bonding, sharing, and social confirmation” (230)) and was as well more concerned with possible links to “pagan relations of drinking” (233).

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is there dissension among the gamblers, it is a rare day that their wives don’tcome to me to request that I sever them from their husbands … since thehusbands do not just gamble they also wager the household’s clothing, gold, jewelry, and even their bodies. This last week there came to me a woman,crying, hungry and with a babe at her breast, asking for separation from herhusband. He not only gambles every morning and afternoon …, but comes home angry from the game and beats her for not having food on the table. …Another woman came to me crying and asked that I support her against herfather who had gambled at cards and lost in a game with Manila men in thebarrio of Passolo. The father had lost two water buffalo, his land, rice, morethan fifty pesos, and everything else that they had in the house. The wife andchildren had nothing to eat.

The priest went on to mention that he had received word that there was heavy drinking and partying going on with the card games in some of the more remote parts of the pueblo. Notwithstanding clerical concerns, gambling and drinking seem to have continued. One Franciscan writing in 1774 said that he knew of cases where pueblo officials had set up gambling dens in houses in the población itself, in one case even in the government house. Of course all was done by keeping the sites and activity hidden from the priest. 93

Also differing from the teachings, expectations, and strictures of the imperial priests in the Filipinos were religious beliefs and practices. For the sacraments in general, one Franciscan reported in 1785 that Filipino non-compliance was widespread.94 The sacrament of baptism was fairly well observed, depending on terrain, weather, health, energy of the priest, and commitment of the baby’s family. Presumably those families with newborns in the población were more readily able to have their newborns baptized than those born in outlying settlements. This Franciscan states that “seven or eight days after birth the baby is carried … to the Church where, by means of Holy Baptism the child enters into the society of the Holy Church, becomes a child of God and an heir to His glory” (ff. 37-38). However, he himself noted that he had baptized children of two or three months of age (ff. 90-91), apparently in a pueblo without a resident priest. A study of parish records in Nagcarlan reports that the

mean number of days between [birth and baptism] ranged from three to five for

93 AFIO 8/2, Informe de varios Religiosos a nuestro Provincial y de este al Gobernador General de Filipinas … sobre malhechores y trastornos ocurridos en el Archipiélago, Mss., 1774; here, 12 July 1774, ff. 22v-23, by P. Fr. Miguel de Brihuega.

94 P. Fr. Francisco José Pérez Cobos o de la Encarnación [name on the manuscript is Francisco, Pérez de los Cobos y Maestre de la Encarnación, O.F.M.], Manifiesto canónico-politico-moral en que se hace ver lo vil y precioso del presente estado de las tres missions de Puncan, Caranglan and Pantabangan y se proponen los medios que mas pueden conducer a sus mejoras en lo Cristiano y civil. Ms., 240 leaves, dated 14 September 1785, Puncan, copy provided through the courtesy of the Santa Barbara [California[ Mission Archives.

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all the records examined. For those years [sampled], five to 33 percent of the infants of Nagcarlan [were] baptized within the first two days of birth, and between 67 and 90 percent [were] baptized within the first week of birth. The trend was towards a shorter lapse between birth and baptism as the century wore on.95

Sacraments other than baptism tended to be performed with less compliance to Church prescriptions. The same 1785 writer, P. Fr. Francisco José Pérez Cobos o de la Encarnación, mentions the widespread tendency in the Islands to go to Confession only once a year. He saw this practice as in effect undercutting the ability of the priest to influence parishioners against social behavior such as “adultery, incest, and sacrileges” (ff. 59-60). Even those who went to Confession once a year were not always forthcoming in the confessional (ff. 61-63):

It is certain that the sins of the Yndio are common knowledge to theYndio while hidden from the magistrates who can punish them. It is truethat the Yndio does not hide the commission of his fault from [another] Yndio,but he hides it from the parish priest who can correct him. It would be toomuch to hope that the officials of justice, not even the zelador of the pueblo, would report him, since they are all of the same sort and belong to a strict brotherhood [promising to] cover things up among themselves. It is because of this that many bad things done by Yndios are hidden. I do not deny that the Yndio makes confession, though many do not, at least annually. Nonetheless it is very certain that what is confessed is as much as the Yndio wishes and things not asked about are not mentioned, which usually means all the disorders of the Yndio’s past. They confess to the small and the great disobediences, to the reprimands and words of the devil … but they omit to mention adultery, incest, obscenities, and rash acts … the sins of the flesh, the harmful and vain observances, superstitions, and usury. These they do not regard as great sins but rather as custom of the land from olden times, known to all and practiced by most.

This statement and statements in other reports mention complicity of Filipinos in concealing those subject to recrimination or punishment by the priest. The point of course is that in these cases Filipino allegiances were more significant in the community than the priest’s authority and prestige. Notwithstanding clerical concerns, the practices that diverged from Roman Catholic norms continued, apparently not just with the connivance of Filipino pueblo officials but also with Filipino church personnel (e.g., the zelador as mentioned in the statement above).

The statement that “These they do not regard as great sins but rather as custom of the land from olden times” suggests that the rules and expectations of the Church did not penetrate

95 Ng Shui Meng, Demographic Change, Marriage and Family Formation: The Case of Nineteenth Century Nagcarlan, the Philippines, Ph.D. dissertation, Sociology, University of Hawaii, December 1979, 48-49.

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and encompass all aspects of Island life. Even in the arena of Philippine Catholicism, Filipino custom and habits persisted. The practice of Communion was neglected, usually only done according to this 1785 source on required days (f. 65).96 The last rites, perhaps because of distance from the church, were also inconsistently given—though, paradoxically, they were asked for frequently and unnecessarily (f. 40). Another source suggests that customs after death also departed from strictly orthodox Spanish Catholic practice:97

As part of the customs associated with burials, these naturales gather in thehouse of the deceased to pray the rosary for relief. While the work itself is good, it is one that has bad consequences, not only in impoverishing the surviving spouse … who has to feed them all … but also because both sexes and of all ages are together at night but [not in the practice] of our holy faith. The Indios have adopted the Chinese view that the soul of the deceased comes on the third day after death to visit the family members … For this reason it is convenient to order … that if they wish to continue such a pious act of prayer [for the deceased] that they do it in the church after Mass.

There were other beliefs and practices that Filipinos practiced that diverged from Roman Catholic orthodoxy. For instance, Filipinos are reported to have had strong beliefs in the Tigbalang, the Tamboli, the Osvang [aswang], the Patianac, the Sava, the Naanayo, the Tavac, Mutya, amulets, and the Nono.98 While actual worship of anitos or idols seems to have been snuffed out in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,99 we do have some references circa 1700

96 A nineteenth century set of numbers for Camarines Sur, Camarines Norte, Albay, and Tayabas suggests that about 26% did not take communion, about a fifth of these because they did not know the essential components of the Doctrina Christiana. Bruce Cruikshank, Spanish Franciscans in the Colonial Philippines, 1578-1898 (Hastings, NE: Cornhusker Press, 2003), v. 1, 208.

97 P. Fr. Lorenzo Pérez, O.F.M., “Informe del P. Francisco Antonio Maceyra sobre varios puntos de los que convendría tratar en el Concilio provincial de Manila,” Archivo Ibero-Americano, 30 (1928), 375-97; here, 395-396. I am doubtful of the author’s view that the practice came from the Chinese, guessing instead that it was an Island belief and perhaps antedated the Spanish conquest.

98 Ibid., 379-386, orthography as given and described at some length in the published manuscript that P. Fr. Lorenzo Pérez, O.F.M., published. Only one of these terms appears in and is defined by W. E. Retana in his “Diccionario de Filipinismos con la Revisión de lo que al respect lleva publicado La Real Academia Española,” Revue Hispanique, 51: 120 (1921), 1-174, though with the variant spelling Asuán, “Espiritu malign, nocturne, que toma diversas formas y se dedica a causar maleficios, señaladamente a las mujeres que están de parto, cuyo fruto malogra” (38).

99 For an instance of a late sixteenth-century attack on these forms of non-Christian belief, see Manuel R. Pazos, O.F.M., “El P. Diego del Villar extermina la idolatría entre los tagalos Filipinos de Lumbang,” Archivo ibero-Americano, Series 2, 8 (1948), 531-535, where 173 “anitos, algunas estaban cubiertas de ojas de oro de martillo, y otras de plata, y otras encubiertas en anillos, y otras en piedras y palos, más estimadas y guardadas que los propios ojos” were collected with other items and burned in the patio of the church ca. 1596. One might also find useful P. Fr. José Castaño, “Breve Noticia acerca del Origen, Religión, Creencias y Supersticiones de los Antiguos Indios del Bicol,” as printed in Wenceslao E. Retana, Archivo del Bibliófilo Filipino: Recopilación de Documentos Históticos, Científicos, Literarios y Políticos y Estudios Bibliográficos (Madird: Impr. en Casa de la Viuda de M. Minuesa de los Rios, 1895-1905), v. 1 (1895), 57pp. Also see Vicente L. Rafael, Contracting Colonialism. Translation and

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to various non-Christian practices and vigorous but perhaps unsuccessful Franciscan responses to them:

And since some of the naturales performed maganittos100 or superstitious rites,they were rigorously punished, in public, both as a punishment and as anexample to others.101

Not only do I102 not know of any priest who permits superstitions or maganitosamong the Indios in these two provinces [Albay and Camarines], but in AlbayP. Fr. Domingo de San Lorenzo had a body in Malinao disinterred when helearned that it had been buried with … some superstitious [artifacts]. … In [Camalig] in the Camarines, P. Fr. Alonzo de Zafra, former Provincial, Punished the Maestra of the girls in the pueblo and her assistants for [complicity in the practice of some] superstitious rite.103

The priests have been particularly careful that the Yndios do not makeMaganitos or other superstitious things … and if [the priests] learn thatthey have, the Yndios have been punished publicly.104

Christian Conversion in Tagalog Society under Early Spanish Rule (Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 1988), 191 and passim.

100 “Maganitos. Offerings and prayers to gods and anitos by the people of the Philippines during the Spanish times.” Tomas D. Andres, Dictionary of Filipino Culture and Values (Quezon City: Giraffe Books, 1994), 98. “Anitos. Gods for the restoration of health; these were minor deities which pre-hispanic Filipinos revered and esteemed as intermediaries to God,” Ibid., 7.

101 Fondo Franciscano, Biblioteca nacional del Museo de Antropologia e Historia, Vol. 160, f. 19, from the statement by the Franciscan P. Fr. Agustin de Madrid, 1703.

102 From testimony responding to charges of malpractice made against the Franciscans, Fondo Franciscano, Biblioteca nacional del Museo de Antropología e Historia, Vol. 160, f. 21v, from the statement supporting the Franciscans by a Diego Arriola, Alcalde mayor of Camarines and Albay.

103 P, Fr. Alonso de Zafra was elected Provincial in 1696 and 1697, giving us a rough time period for his reprimand of the Maestra. P. Fr. Domingo de San Lorenzo was Comisario Provincial of the Camarines in 1694, which may have been when the disinterment occurred; it certainly was not after 1696, since Malinao was turned over by the Franciscans to diocesan administration in 1696.

104 Fondo Franciscano, Biblioteca nacional del Museo de Antropología e Historia, Vol. 160, f.24, from the statement by the former Alcalde mayor of Albay, a Capitan Don Frutos de Delgado. This seeming contradiction—take care that none are made and punish those that do make them—reminds me a bit of the unintentional humor of the sign I saw in a window in Ermita in 1972 next to an ornamental Sari Manok for sale: “The Sari Manok is a mythological bird found only in Mindanao.”

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We know that these or other practices continued well into the twentieth century.105 There are contemporary practices that are very much within the larger Catholic tradition of local shrines, special amulets and prayers, local healers, and so forth, just the sort of thing one finds in other areas of the Roman Catholic world.106 The overwhelming impression these reports give us is that Filipinos who undoubtedly considered themselves good Christians had integrated beliefs and practices into a functioning whole that from their perspective did not seem to contain inconsistencies or conflict. While Franciscans seem to have regularly decried certain practices, particularly when combined with neglect of the core sacraments and practices of the orthodoxy, the practices generally were perpetuated through time and space to become in some form part and parcel of Philippine religion, then and now.107

Filipinos seem to have been active in making their own synthesis of Christianity and other beliefs. We have seen as well that they were active in other arenas as well, pursuing their own interests and activities. Not infrequently such choices involved opposition to strictures from the priest—live in the población, no bride service, obey and religiously adhere to the sacraments of the Church, discard non-Christian religious beliefs, register, reside, and pay tribute in one pueblo, obey priest and Spanish government officials more than local Filipino leaders, and so forth.

The patterns I have tracked are not individual and idiosyncratic but seem to have been widespread. They show arenas of Filipino freedom from mandated colonial expectations. Conversely the patterns show the perspectival error in the statement that “the parish priest had by

105 See, out of a very large literature, “Folk Practices and Beliefs of Leyte and Samar: The Collected Articles of Fr. Richard Arens, SVD, reprinted,” Leyte-Samar Studies, 5: 1-2 (1971); Maria G. Villegas, R.S.M., “Superstitious Beliefs and Practices in the Coastal Towns of Eastern Leyte,” Unitas, 44: 2 (June 1971), 28-95; and Francis X. Lynch, S.J., “An Mga Asuwáng. A Bicol Belief,” Philippine Social Sciences and Humanities Review, 14: 4 (1949), 401-427, reprinted in Aram A. Yengoyan and Perla Q. Makil, eds., Philippine Society and the Individual. Selected Essays of Frank Lynch, 1949-1976 (Ann Arbor: Center for South and Southeast Asia, The University of Michigan, 1984), 175-196. Also see Francisco R. Demetrio, S.J., comp., Encyclopedia of Philippine Folk Beliefs and Customs (Cagayan de Oro City: Xavier University, 1991), 2 vols., with entries based on informant reports from (mainly) the twentieth century (particularly from 1986-87) on topics such as amulets, aswangs, birth and death beliefs, diseases, engkantos, folk medicine, marriage, natural phenomena, etc.

106 See, for instance, Fenella Cannell, Power and Intimacy in the Christian Philippines (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press (Cambridge Studies in Social and Cultural Anthropology), 1999), 13 and 165-182, for her discussion of “the shrine of the Amang Hinulid or ‘Christ laid out in death,’” on the edge of Calabanga (13).

107 Father John Schumacher, S.J., has written perceptively on the patterns of syncretism and Filipino Catholicism. See, for instance, his “Some Historical Considerations on the Evangelization of the Philippines,” Contemporary Studies, 2: 4 (December 1965), 222-237, where he says at one point that “even where Christianity was mingled with pagan superstitions, this need not have meant that Christianity was no more than a superficial veneer of outward ritual observance; faith can be real, even when mixed with what is, objectively speaking, pagan in form. This, too, has been a common experience in the Christianization of Europe, only overcome with the passage of time and the bringing of reform and instruction.”

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necessity to be all for all,’ to be present ‘in all aspects of social life … in all that happened’ in the pueblo.”108 A well-known scholar argued in 1965 that

In this tranquil and peaceful situation, the parish priest, mostgenerally a Spanish Friar, was in an ideal sense, the father of his parish.All looked to him for advice on the principal decisions of life, advice which was generally more precept than suggestion. The Padre was the defender of his people against the exactions and rapacity of the alcaldes-mayores, and other government officials who might chance to visit a provincial town on some rare occasion. It was with the advice and approval of the Padre that the principalía made their decisions for the government of the town; it was to the Padre that the cabezas de barangay went to get approval of their tax lists; it was the Padre whom the governadoricllo, who as often as not could not read Spanish, asked to translate the orders which came from the government in Manila or from the provincial capital; and it was the Padre who told him how they were to be carried out, and what reply was to be made. The Padre it was who settled the disputes which arose among his people, who more often than not provided for the schooling of the children in default of the government, who saw to it that the young men and women married at a suitable age, and often perhaps even arranged the match between them. He was the father of his people, for, as numerous Friars insisted in their writings ‘los indios son niños grandes’ and had to be treated as such.109

I do agree at times the priest could be advisor, defender, and translator for Filipinos. I also agree that priests seem to have subscribed to the colonial stereotypical nonsense that all Filipinos were children.

I would argue that these views are wrong, more idealistic than realistic. The parish priest might have attempted to be everything that was said, but in fact it appears his power was limited and the capability of Filipinos to bypass and manipulate him was understated in that quotation. Filipinos in practice worked with and around the priest. A wise priest would have worked with the influential Filipinos, as the authoritative Father Ignacio de Alcina, S.J., observed for Samar:110

108 P. Fr. Lorenzo Pérez, O.F.M., Los Franciscanos en las Islas Filipinas (Vich: Editorial Seráfica, 1929), 14; I quoted the phrase with what now I see as mistaken approval in Bruce Cruikshank, Samar: 1768-1898 (Manila: Historical Conservation Society, 1985), 63.

109 Father John Schumacher, S.J., “Some Historical Considerations on the Evangelization of the Philippines,” Contemporary Studies, 2: 4 (December 1965), 222-237; here, 227-228. Bold-facing is in the original.

110 Francisco Ignacio de Alcina, S.J., Historia natural del sitio, fertilidad y calidad de las Islas e Indios de Bisayas,” 1668, translated by Dr. Paul Lietz, Book 4, Chapter 7, quoted in Bruce Cruikshank, Samar: 1768-1898 (Manila: Historical Conservation Society, 1985), 44.

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Anyone who wishes to have much success in doing what he wants with[the Samareños] must win over the chiefs … everything depends on them, and a word from them carries more weight than ten words of ours. Without their help one exhausts himself, accomplishes little and wearshimself out to no avail, while they end up laughing.

My reading of the manuscripts suggests that the priest could be a dangerous enemy for most Filipinos, though perhaps not as dangerous as Filipino principal families or the Spanish provincial governor. The priest could also be a useful ally, and indispensable when one wanted to participate in church sacraments and to prepare pueblo fiestas. My impression is that the parish priest, Spanish or not, friar or diocesan or Jesuit, was for most of the time fundamentally marginal to the lives and activities of the bulk of the people in the pueblos and in the hills. For most Filipinos the priest would have been seen from a distance, if at all. He would have been a resource during life crises or rites of passage. However he would have been usually peripheral to the actual lives and daily activities of most Filipinos in the lowlands or in the mountains. Filipinos through accommodation, avoidance, and political savvy created arenas that were not ruled by church and priest.

Norman Owen has observed from his careful work in Tigaon that “the hold of the Church was much less strong in nineteenth-century Tigaon than our usual impression of Philippine society under Spanish rule would suggest. … the Church did not dominate even those aspects of the public life of Tigaon it most assiduously recorded … apparently they did not feel constrained to abide consistently by all the rules of the Church, even with regard to the sacraments.”111 While he continues by observing that “in Nagcarlan … the influence and administrative hold of the Church appear, on the evidence of parish records, to have been much stronger”, he concludes that “we may well suspect that Tigaon is more typical of the Philippines as a whole than Nagcarlan is.” While his work is focused on the nineteenth century, we can with some confidence project the findings back in time where they coincide with the manuscript comments I have cited for eighteenth-century areas served by Franciscans. One should add the caveats, of course, that popular fervor might change from time to time; that priests differed in health and the physical ability to trek throughout the municipality, and population and settlement density might have changed, but overall we can be confident that Filipinos made decisions that did not always coincide with the expectations and strictures expressed by the Spanish imperial church and state.

I should add one more qualification. Priests and religious leaders in most of the world’s faiths have, so to speak, as part of their job description the obligation to contrast the high moral and ethical standards of the faith against the real or perceived deficiencies in the behaviors of the

111 Norman G. Owen, “Life, Death, and the Sacraments in a Nineteenth-Century Bikol Parish,” in Daniel F. Doeppers and Peter Xenos, eds., Population and History. The Demographic Origins of the Modern Philippines (Madison: Center for Southeast Asian Studies, University of Wisconsin, 1989), 243-244.

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believers. One recognizes that priests by definition ask those under their direction to renounce and limit human appetites and behaviors. Religions, particularly those originating from the Eastern Mediterranean areas such as Judaism, Christianity, and Islam have quite high expectations for ethical behavior and renunciations. Rabbis, priests or pastors, and ulama will frequently be seen as frustrated on the one hand and hectoring on the other, though personalities and wisdom of these religious leaders will vary. My point is not that such expressions of ethical concern occurred or that individual Filipinos were sometimes singled out for clerical correction—or, conversely, that some Filipinos were strict in adhering to Roman Catholic precepts and expectations in behavior, ethics, and ritual. Individual extremes of both sorts undoubtedly existed.112 I am discussing seemingly chronic examples of the majority of Filipinos in eighteenth-century pueblos, not individual and unique transgressions. I am arguing that many Filipinos seem to have chosen to re-interpret the demands of Church and State in ways that fit better their own priorities, preoccupations, and customs.

What we have seen are examples of Franciscans writing repeatedly about large-scale issues of behavior and adherence. Many Filipinos in their charge seem to have refused to change, refused to behave in the ways the Franciscan parish priest wanted or demanded. Again and again we witness unsuccessful attempts by the Franciscans to congregate and resettle Filipinos in and around the church. Again and again we find references to widespread use of alcohol as well as intractable addiction to gambling. We have seen Filipino social and religious beliefs and practices that were considered not orthodox as well as conducive to immorality or occasions for sin. Even attempts to get all Filipinos to attend Mass and confess at least once a year seem to have been of limited success.

Roman Catholic rituals and ethical expectations were followed in part. Non-Christian beliefs were followed in part. A Franciscan parish priest was obeyed when prudent and avoided or evaded when not convenient. One changes or one does not, one obeys or one does not. Outright defiance could be dangerous and costly, but avoidance and evasion as well as enlisting the political help of prominent Filipino families seem to have been successful stratagems. The image of the all-powerful friar dominating local life and all the Filipinos within the large area we call a pueblo is a myth, though as I have pointed out variable according to Filipino responses, terrain, weather, health, and wisdom and psychology of the friar. The longer a priest was in a pueblo, the better knowledge he would have of its family, political, social, and economic

112 Stereotypes are dangerous of course, be they pictures of friars or of Filipinos. The Filipino population was not homogeneous. It was divided by sex, age, residence, family situation, economics, ability, moral code, education, and psychology. The experience of a woman would have been quite different from a man’s, a child was viewed and treated differently from an adult. Some Filipinos farmed, fished, hunted, or combinations of those; others lived off others’ labor. Some Filipinos were better off economically and from more prominent families than others. Individual opportunities, abilities, personalities, and codes of behavior would have varied as well. Some Filipinos appear to have chosen to avoid, evade, and manipulate the priest and the Spanish system more than others.

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dynamics, the better he would be equipped to work within the Filipino universe instead of vainly trying to force accommodation from outside.

The greater the size of the pueblo, the more extensive its territory and dispersion of population, and the more skilled the leading Filipino families were in political and economic networking, the less ability most priests would have had to be the leading figure that earlier studies have presented. We know that population size of pueblos administered by the Franciscans increased throughout the period of Spanish rule. If tributos are roughly equivalent to parents then they are also equivalent to families, which conventionally is usually measured at four members per family. We have statistics that suggest that pueblos administered by Franciscans with more than about 2,400 residents throughout the municipal district increased from 11% in 1649 to 24% in 1751 and to 59% in 1797.113 It has been said that the desirable ratio of parish priests to parishioners is about 1 to 1,000, although one source says that in the twentieth-century Philippines 1 to 2,000 would be acceptable.114 With dispersion and lack of mechanized transport, opportunities for Filipino initiative, political networking, and opportunities to live and believe without clerical supervision would have been significant.

113 Statistics taken from Bruce Cruikshank, Spanish Franciscans in the Colonial Philippines, 1578-1898 (Hastings, NE: Cornhusker Press, 2003), v. 1, 206.

114 The 1:1,000 figure is from the 1953 anonymous article “Distribution of Priests” (Philippine Studies, 1: 2 (September 1953), 169-173. The second figure is from University of Chicago, Philipine Studies Program, Area Handbook on the Philippines (New Haven, Connecticut: Human Relations Area Files, 1956. 4v.), v. 2, 494; which says that the 1956 ratio of about 6,100 Catholics to a priest is “about three times as many as any parish priest can properly serve,” or about one to 2,000. A study from Latin America suggests that 1:1,600 would be difficult: “Solórzano, discussing the size of the doctrinas in his Política indiana, gave a more pragmatic interpretation: 400 Indian households were assigned to each doctrina because the population would be sufficient to provide a living for a priest, while not exceeding the number that one priest could properly care for.” Adriaan C. Van Oss, Catholic Colonialism. A Parish History of Guatemala, 1524-1821 (England: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 61, citing Solórzano, Política Indiana, Libro 4, Cap. 15, Párr. 54.

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Conclusions

Easter is arguably the most important season in the Christian religious calendar, and I have presented some of the religious and ritual aspects in the first chapter. In the Philippine colonial context it epitomized the dual nature of the priest’s role, spiritual as well as administrator for the king’s government centered in Manila. If we focus on this second aspect of the priest we will be able to glimpse some of the themes outlined in the previous chapters.

The civil, administrative role of the pueblo priest centered on his role in compiling a roster or padrón of individuals and families living in the pueblo. This roster was used for a variety of functions, but fundamentally it served to account for those Filipinos subject to tribute payments and forced labor or requisitions of goods. The parish priest was charged with making sure that the pueblo Filipino officials developed such a list and then validating it. In the first part of the eighteenth century the list was updated every three or four or so years; in the latter part of the century it was supposed to be updated yearly. The priest relied on the gobernadorcillo and other pueblo officials to compile and update the list, and we have already seen that some Filipino officials used the opportunity to hide potential tribute payers and instead have them work on their own lands and pay for exclusion with coin and labor. We have also seen that some pueblo bureaucracies became inflated as a way to protect others from imperial tribute and labor exactions while helping the gobernadorcillo or leading families to increase their networks of followers. I won’t repeat that material here but will rather focus on the priest and his administrative role for the state.

The official roster of the pueblo was compiled and updated at a specific season of the year—the Easter season. Easter in the colonial Philippines was both a religious holiday of signal importance in the Christian calendar as well as a notable time for acknowledgment of governmental power and the authority of Spain. Filipino acknowledgment of submission and obligation to Spain was demonstrated by registering for and submitting to the tribute and other taxes owed to the imperial master. The connection between Easter and tribute was explicit. It was at Easter time that one was obligated to both participate in religious acts and rituals as well as to acknowledge civil and tax submission by registering in the padrón. The religious sacrament of Confession was the vehicle for tax registration. No Filipino

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was ready to make actual confession until he had been examined in the basictenets of Christian doctrine and the principal Christian prayers, and until hehad been issued by the examiner a piece of paper stamped with the sello (seal)provided for by the Ministro for that specific purpose. This sello must bepresented to the confessor [before confession]. After confession the Ministrogave the penitent another seal called cédula de confesión which authorizedhim to receive Holy Communion the following day. …

The missionaries had recourse to the use of sellos and cédulas to maintain some order and to manage that all the faithful under their care complied with this important Christian duty. … Apparently the sello and cédulas carried important information concerning the holder, such as name, age, sex, barangay head, occupation, legal status, because the missionary was able to make the padrón of the year from the cédulas de confesión collected from those who received their Easter-day Holy Communion. …115

The padrón listed families and their tax or tribute obligations for the year. The description of the categories and organization underline the civil uses to which it would be put:116

using both of those seals, the priest will make up a list of inhabitants (padrón) … putting first the Cabeza de Barangay and his household, and then the others,house by house. [Within each household, list the individuals in this order:]husband, wife, children, and slaves, if there are any, signifying those who aremarried and those unmarried, males first and then females if they are single.

Having finished the listing of the pueblo, by each barangay then list those men reserved from the tribute, and then those women who are reserved,followed by the [young males (Bagontavos)] who are not tribute payers, followed by the [young women (Dalagas)] who are not yet of the age for thetribute. Then put the schoolboys, even those who for whatever reason do notattend school. Then list all the girls who are of the same age as the schoolboys.

115 Luis D. Balquiedra, The Development of the Ecclesial and Liturgical Life in the Spanish Philippines. A Case of Interaction between Liturgy, Cult of Saints and Extraliturgical Religious Practices in the Upbuilding of the Filipino church in Franciscan Pueblos 1578-1870 (Ph.D. dissertation, Doctor in Sacred Liturgy, The Pontifical Liturgical Institute S. Anselmo, Rome, 1982. 765pp.), 230-231. Also see Vicente L. Rafael, Contracting Colonialism. Translation and Christian Conversion in Tagalog Society under Early Spanish Rule (Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 1988), 94-135.

116 Estatutos, y Ordenaciones de la Santa Provincia de S. Gregorio de Religiosos Descalzos de la regular, y mas estrecha Observancia de N. S. P. S. Francisco de Philipinas. Dispuestas, y ordenadas por el Compromisso de el Discretorio, y Diffinitorio en el Capitulo Provincial celebrado en nuestro Convento de Nuestra Señora de los Angeles de la Ciudad de Manila el dia 8. del mes de Junio del año de 1726. Y mandadas dár á la estampa por el Ministro Provincial, y Venerable Diffinitorio el año de 1730 (Manila: Reimp. en el Convento de Nuestra Señora de Loreto del Pueblo de Sampaloc, 1753). I am translating from the photocopy of Chapter 7 of these Estatutos in Balquiedra, Appendix 11, pp. 549-567.

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Then enter those who are Aetas as well as those Christian indios who are notyet congregated into the pueblo … and one must also list the Chinese and anyother foreigners who might be in the pueblo.

Spiritual and civil obligations neatly reinforced each other, and thus “both majesties” were acknowledged.

This congruence of civil and religious authority and obligation notwithstanding, we saw in Chapter One that Easter was primarily a spiritual set of rituals and exercises and obligations, similar to some of the fiesta and other ceremonies described earlier as well but much more prolonged, intense, and demanding. Throughout, Filipino participation was active and enthusiastic, voluntary as well as mandated. The Filipinos who participated—from the pueblo’s civil administrators to the church’s fiscal and other church officials to the parishioners—had seen that the church and streets were decorated appropriately and enthusiastically attended the prolonged sequence of events associated with this seminal myth of the Christian faith. Filipinos, as good Christians of the period, were also obligated to fast at specified periods as well as to participate in forms of penance, some of which some parishioners took to with great enthusiasm.

What is perhaps most striking is the coincidence of this popular passion and devotion centered on one of the holiest periods of the Christian calendar with the use of Confession as a way to construct the mundane census that would be the basis for exacting taxes in kind or in specie from the Filipino subjects. Franciscan priests were expected to pass these tallies up the hierarchy to Manila, where the Franciscan Provincial turned them in to the Spanish civil authorities. Franciscans would not receive their yearly subsidies from the Crown until this was done.117 It is significant in both ideological as well as in practical ways that the padrón was to be compiled from those taking Confession in the church during the Easter season.

Filipino responses to Spanish demands and expectations give us a glimpse into the world of the islanders in the eighteenth century. Here too we can snatch a peek, especially when we learn of how some Filipinos responded to this combination of the spiritual and the tax roll. Here’s a Franciscan response concerning those who tried to take Confession but were not resident in the pueblo: “no minister, in the time of Lent, is to confess an indio from another parish, without permission of the parish priest of that parish, due to the inconveniences that could ensue.”118 In 1718 a Franciscan Provincial noted that there might be awkward situations arising

117 AFIO 79/24, P. Fr. José Casañes, Provincial. Patente. Manila, 20 July 1777 [exhorta a la fiel observancia de la Regla y de sus obligaciones como cristianos y como Ministros de las almas], f. 11.

118 The 1635 Franciscan Constitution, chapter seven, item 11, printed on page 350 of P. Fr. Lorenzo Pérez, O.F.M., “Constituciones de la Apostólica Provincia de San Gregorio,” Archivo Ibero-Oriental, 39: 93 (May-June 1929).

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with the Bishop or the provincial governor and not to confess Filipinos from other pueblos without good reason.119

Mobility is a common theme in the manuscripts and seems to have been a constant in the lives of many Filipinos in this period leading to difficulties in collecting the tribute. Since mobility was legal,120 the Spanish tried to lay out rules and procedures to adjust to the Filipino mode while still collecting taxes and keeping track of the population. While some registered when they resided in a different pueblo from the one they paid tribute in, paying a sum as vagabundos, many ignored and evaded such regulations. We also have the words of a Franciscan writing in 1726 that “we see Indios who within the space of a year usually have two or three pueblos of residence.”121 While we cannot know for sure what motivated this mobility, presumably it was based on perceptions of self-interest and advantage. Other glimpses into the Filipino world come with references to concern by the Franciscans about “those who customarily live hidden in houses and fields [owned] by principales, to those who do not pay the tribute nor [usually do not] hear Mass nor comply with the other obligations and burdens imposed on the pueblo and its neighbors.”122

We find hints as well that some, perhaps many, of the non-official Filipinos in the provinces were actively responding to the impositions and creatively learning to play the system to their advantage, not to the advantage of the Filipino and Spanish officials. One example dates from the late eighteenth century and Spanish governmental attempts to reform the tribute system. At one point the plan was to have the cabezas de barangay issue a certificate to each ostensible tribute payer in his charge. At Easter, when Filipinos were required to attend church and services as well as confess, they were as we have seen to present the certificate, have their name recorded on the roster (the padrón), and thus be subject to the tribute, the polo, and the bandala.

Filipinos quickly figured out that if they did not show up for the Easter Confession and services their names would not be entered on the padrón and they could then avoid

119 AFIO 79/9, P. Fr. Mateo de San José, Provincial, Patentes. San Francisco de Naga, 21 abril 1718, f. 2v: “Por quanto e sido noticiado que algunos religiosos no quieren admitire, ni Confessar por la quaresma a los Indios empadronados en otros Pueblos de que se puede seguir nota y queja al Señor Obispo y Alcalde supplico y mando a Vcds los confiesen; pues siempre se presume tienen algun justo motibo para ello.”

120 Recognized and protected in the Recopilación, Title 1, Libro 6.

121 AFIO 7/20, Informe al Gobernador sobre si convenia cobrar el tributo por cuenta abierta o cerrada, 11 January 1726, 4ff.; here, f. 3.

122 P. Fr. Lorenzo Pérez, O.F.M., “Informe del P. Francisco Antonio Maceyra sobre varios puntos de los que convendría tratar en el Concilio provincial de Manila,” Archivo Ibero-Americano, 30 (1928), 375-97; here 387-388, quoting from the 1771 Informe.

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being subject to tribute demands for that year. As a Franciscan remarked in 1774,123 the previous three years had seen a “very notable” decrease in those coming to Mass and making their confession,

with detriment to their recognition of vassalage to our sovereign through the annual tribute, that they ought to pay to the cavezas de barangay as representatives of the king. The priests must certify … the tributes who are administered in the pueblos, which is done through the padrones that are made up based on certificates that they carry from their cavezas at the time of confession. If they do not confess, their names are not registered in the padrón. … We know the names who should have confessed because of the previous year’s padrón.

Stratagems such as missing annual confession, payoffs to local officials, collaboration, and feigning incompetence and laziness are strategic responses to a corrupt and oppressive system where punishments for direct confrontation could be draconian. Flight and mobility are indicators that are more noticeable and sometimes the linkage was expressly noted. For instance, according to Huerta, a ranchería established by the Franciscans in the municipality of Limotan in 1670, took form and “prospered until the year of 1700” when the government tried to obligate its residents to pay tribute. At that point, they all fled to the hills, and the mission was entirely lost.124

Filipino priorities seem to have been determinative. We see this in a case from a mission settlement, Manguirin, in 1756:125

123 Archivo Franciscano Ibero-Oriental, 8/2, Informes de varios Religiosos a nuestro Provincial y de este al Gobernador General … sobre malhechores y trastornos ocurridos en el Archipiélago, ms., 1774, ff. 1v-2. Another complication was that a separate tax had been levied by the government at this time to be collected at Easter confession, leading to the false perception that Filipinos had to pay for that mandated religious obligation— “It is certain that the Indian believes that he pays for confession, and it is also a fact that if he does not pay he is not confessed” (BRPI, v. 50, pp. 137-190, taken from “Anda’s Memorial, 1768;” here, p. 145).

124 Félix de Huerta, O.F.M., Estado geográfico, topográfico, estadístico, histórico-religioso de la santa y apostólica Provincia de San Gregorio Magno, de religiosos Menores Descalzos de la Regular y más estrecha Observancia de N. S. P. S. Francisco en las islas Filipinas; comprende el número de religiosos, conventos, pueblos, situación de estos, años de su fundación, tributos, almas, producciones, industrias, casos especiales de su administración spiritual, en el archipiélago Filipino, desde su fundación en el año de 1577 hasta el de 1865 (2nd ed., Binondo: M. Sánchez, 1865), 564-565. This might merely be a coincidence, a post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy, but the Franciscan’s impression was that it was a clear case of cause and effect and not a simple coincidence of two phenomena one after another.

125 AFIO 93/17. Carta del P. Fr. Alejandro Ferrer, Provincial, al alcalde mayor de Camarines sobre el Expediente de Manguirin.

Cambio a Himoragat efectuada por Fr. José Esteban Gascueña sin autorizaciones. Sapa, 23 February 1756. 2ff.

Informe sobre puntos principales acerca de la traslación de Manguirin a Himoragat. Ms., 1756.

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… the sitio that is called Santa Cruz of Manguirin … is where the priests suffer from fevers the most, where there is no [adequate] drinking water, and to bathe one has to half a legua from the sitio to the river Ynarihan. To continue with the dreadful [qualities of the place, the inhabitants], except for those who have no tools at all, have implements which barely allow them to make a piece of a field, all of which means that in that sitio there are only a few houses. Most people live [away], in rancherias. The consequence is attendance at Mass is low … Only when they want, and how they want, then they come enthusiastically [Sino solo quando quieren, y como quieren, a una cosa bienen todos gustosos]. Notwithstanding [the dispersion of population], every Wednesday there is a market in the cabecera with markets as well in the sitios on Saturdays and Sundays. In these markets one finds goods and sellers from Bicol, selling meat, fish, tobacco, iron, and many other things, and the cimarrones trade for them with what they have, namely wax, abaca, etc. … In reality they do not want a priest but rather [only] a shadow of a priest. They [only] want [a priest] who will attend to their needs, remove [los saque] their miseries. When they arrive in the doorway the priest receives them with love and gives them protection. Their [need, though,] only lasts as long as they are in the doorway. When they can, they escape ….

Filipino preferences perhaps meant that the priorities of the priests and the governments were of secondary or tertiary significance.

We now have a sketch of Philippine society in the eighteenth century, one where Filipinos had their own political, economic, and social networks. The imperial administrations encompassing clerical and governmental hierarchies reached the pueblos but penetrated the lives of Filipinos in those municipal districts largely at the behest or with the acquiescence of Filipinos. Direct opposition to clerical or governmental colonial power could be costly. Punitive responses were readily employed. Evasion, partial acquiescence, manipulation, playing government against clerical authority, and flight therefore were more successful stratagems.

The priest was ostensibly the center of pueblo life, working both as a cleric and as the representative of the imperial power. It appears to me that in fact the leading families in the pueblo worked through and with the priest and the Spanish provincial governor to effectively run the world of the pueblo, with their influence diminishing as one moved from the población to the

Carta de Don Fernando Caraveo al Provincial P. Alejandro Ferrer, sobre cambio de Manguirin a Himoragat. Manila, 7 February 1756.

Carta del Provincial P. Alejandro Ferrer al P. Juan de Taracena sobre Lagonoy y Manguirin y su cambio a Himoragat. Santa Ana de Sapa, 18 February 1756.

Carta del P. Juan de Taracena al Provincial P. Alejandro Ferrer sobre cambio de Manguirin a Himoragat. Manila, February 1756. This is the manuscript used in the text above.

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farthest outliers. Much of the statements above admittedly are conjectural, based on an interpretive reading of manuscript materials. We appear to have no autobiographies or family histories from Filipino pueblo elite from this period that might support or undercut my argument.

We can go even further. There are paradoxes that touch Filipinos who chose to live in both the boondocks and in the población. For those living far from that población, they had more freedom from Church and State and less hispanization--but along with this came also perhaps less ability to avoid discriminatory prices for their goods, less opportunity for their children to get some formal education, perhaps more subjection to debt bondage and exclusion from church rituals and sacraments. Those Filipinos who lived in the población were close to the church and the residence of the priest, where hispanization and Spanish control should have been the greatest. However, it was here where the leading Filipino families lived and where their political skills and economic power supported their control of the municipality. It is here where they built networks of political and economic influence, recruited followers, received petitions for loans and other help, and made alliances and arranged for allies to hold pueblo and church positions. With political acumen would have come greater influence, power, and wealth, enabling them more effectively to deflect, avoid, and fulfill demands of the Spanish government and the parish priest, artfully working the system and “both majesties.”

Wherever they lived, Filipinos were deemed by Church and State to be colonial subjects. Direct opposition to that subordinate position was destined to be unsuccessful. More artful and evasive methods allowed some Filipinos to manipulate the system to their advantage while appearing to be dutiful subjects of crown and church. Those who chose to live outside the población, in sitios or hidden in the hills, effectively chose a life of freedom but were subject to constraints of environment, exploitation by powerful families, and lacked regular opportunities to grow through formal education and religious instruction. Those in the población were apparently less free from Spanish rules, but they enjoyed greater opportunities for family advancement and personal growth. The Spanish ruled, Filipinos chose their responses.

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Bibliography

Manuscript Collections Cited

AFIO: Archivo Franciscano Ibero-Oriental, Madrid, Spain

Fondo: Fondo Franciscano, Biblioteca Nacional del Museo de Antropología e Historia, Mexico City, Mexico

PNA: The Philippine National Archives, Manila, Philippines

Selected Publications and Dissertations

Archilla, Jose S., S.J.“Slavery, Flogging and Other Moral Cases in 17th Century Philippines.” Philippine

Studies, 20:3 (1972), 399-416.

Balquiedra, Luis D.The Development of the Ecclesial and Liturgical Life in the Spanish Philippines. A Case

of Interaction between Liturgy, Cult of Saints and Extraliturgical Religious Practices in the Upbuilding of the Filipino church in Franciscan Pueblos 1578-1870. Ph.D. dissertation, Doctor in Sacred Liturgy, The Pontifical Liturgical Institute S. Anselmo, Rome, 1982. 765pp. [abbreviated as Balquiedra in the essay]

Barrion, M. Caridad, O.S.B.“Religious Life of the Laity in Eighteenth Century Philippines as Reflected in the

Decrees of the Council of Manila of 1771 and the Synod of Calasiao of 1773.” Boletin Eclesiastico de Filipinas, 34 (1960), 426-438; 490-501; 552-565; 698-708; 763-773; and 35 (1961), 43-51.

Gómez Platero, Eusebio, O.F.M.Catálogo biográfico de los Religiosos Franciscanos de la Provincia de San Gregorio

Magno de Filipinas desde 1577 en que llegaron los primeros a Manila hasta los de nuestros días Manila: Colegio de Santo Tomás, 1880. 813pp.

Huerta, Félix de, O.F.M.Estado geográfico, topográfico, estadístico, histórico-religioso de la santa y apostólica

Provincia de San Gregorio Magno, de religiosos Menores Descalzos de la Regular y más estrecha Observancia de N. S. P. S. Francisco en las islas Filipinas; comprende el número de religiosos, conventos, pueblos, situación de estos, años de su fundación, tributos, almas, producciones, industrias, casos especiales de su administración spiritual, en el archipiélago Filipino, desde su fundación en el año de 1577 hasta el de 1865. 2nd ed. Binondo: M. Sánchez, 1865. 713pp.

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Owen, Norman G.“Life, Death, and the Sacraments in a Nineteenth-Century Bikol Parish.” IN Daniel F.

Doeppers and Peter Xenos, eds., Population and History. The Demographic Origins of the Modern Philippines (Madison: Center for Southeast Asian Studies, University of Wisconsin, 1998), 225-252.

Owen, Norman G.“The Principalia in Philippine History: Kabikolan, 1790-1898,” Philippine Studies, 22

(1974), 297-324.

Owen, Norman G.“Requiem for a Heroic Priest.” IN Festschrift in Honor of Dr. Marcelino Foronda, Jr.,

edited by Emerita S. Quito (Manila: De La Salle University Press, 1987), 243-245.

Pérez, Lorenzo, O.F.M.“Informe del P. Francisco Antonio Maceyra sobre varios puntos de los que convendría

tratar en el Concilio provincial de Manila,” Archivo Ibero-Americano, 30 (1928), 375-397.

Schumacher, John, S.J.“Some Historical Considerations on the Evangelization of the Philippines,”

Contemporary Studies, 2: 4 (December 1965), 222-237.

University of Chicago, Philipine Studies ProgramArea Handbook on the Philippines. New Haven, Connecticut: Human Relations Area

Files, 1956. 4v. [abbreviated as Chicago Handbook in the essay]

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