Note 13 — INTERNAL POLITICAL CONDITION OF THE PHILIPPINES, 1842

It is necessary to provide that a Spanish cura be placed in each village, and it is preferable to leave a village without a minister rather than to place it in charge of a Filipino secular priest. Between Filipinas and España there is no other bond of union than the Christian religion. This bond is very powerful, and may induce the islanders to love and to defend the Spanish domination as a duty. In no place better than in España is it known of what the religious influence on the masses is capable, even in violation of their most direct interests. To imagine that the natives will become fond of our government because they judge it good or the best possible, I believe a vain project. Their ignorance regarding the condition of other peoples does not permit of their entering into such comparisons; and those who might be capable of doing it, will discuss political matters; and however excellent such men consider our domination, they would always think that it would be more advantageous for them to withdraw from the yoke and seize the scepter in their own hands, and pass by this method from their humble condition of vassals and subjugated to that of masters and mandarins. Therefore, just as the community is sustained by virtue and the monarchy by fidelity, this colony, in my opinion, must be maintained by religion. Starting from this beginning, nothing can become so direct an agent for promoting emancipation, as the ordaining of priests among the natives.13 Some persons observe that they are unfit and vicious, and consequently, do not infuse respect, exercise influence or cause fear. More, if a Filipino secular priest lives in a state of intoxication, and even commits, as has indeed happened, atrocious crimes which lead him to the scaffold, he does not for this cease to be a priest; and thus he degrades the class to which he belongs, and undermines the prestige of sanctity surrounding the character of a religious man. And this idea, namely, that because they are Filipinos, they cannot have any influence, has been destroyed by merely the recent insurrection in Tayabas, where a lay-brother, a young fellow, without any personal or antecedent quality that could make him respected, was able, by means of a religious matter—without the printed copies of the admonition of the archbishop of Manila, or the Spanish friars of the neighboring territory, being able to prevent it—to cause a settlement to mutiny and to arm a crowd of three or four thousand men, even to the point of firing upon their own pastors, who only saved themselves by means of flight; to kill the governor of the province; and attack the national troops. And so that my opinion in regard to this matter is, and has been, that of many others who studied the country, I shall copy a few extracts illustrative of the matter.14