Note 10 — THE PHILIPPINES, 1860–1898—SOME COMMENT AND BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTES

In another way the return of the Jesuits is to be associated with the beginning of a new era in the islands. They were not permitted to resume the parochial benefices which their order had held prior to their expulsion in 1768, but were to engage in missions in Mindanao and in educational and scientific work. Their resumption of the old missions in Mindanao was accomplished at the expense of the order of Recollects, which was thereupon given the provision of certain parishes, including several wealthy parishes in Luzon, which had for greater or less intervals been held by the more prominent and able of the secular priests, Filipinos of pure native blood or half-castes.10 The cabildo of the Manila cathedral, including the more notable of the secular priests, and the curates of the few conspicuous parishes (in central Luzon) which it fell to the lot of the secular clergy to occupy, had come to regard these benefices as their property, in a “corporate” sense, as it were, quite as each religious order felt that certain parishes, or whole provinces “belonged” to it as an order. It is significant that here, for the first time, one notes a feeling of solidarity among the Filipino secular clergy—for the demonstration of which feeling one has looked in vain, except in isolated cases, prior to that time, above all in connection with the effort (1770) of the Spanish archbishop Santa Justa y Rufina, to secularize the parishes and displace the friars with native priests. Only the bolder of the Filipino priests expressed the complaints of their fellows, even now, and open talk of a campaign for secularization of all the parishes was scarcely heard until some courage was infused into these few and the small party of Filipino Liberals (mostly half-castes or Spaniards of Philippine birth) after the revolution of 1868 and the arrival of a governor-general who permitted public demonstrations in behalf of Liberal reforms. From the time of the execution of three Filipino priests for alleged complicity in the Cavite mutiny of 187211—the proofs of whose guilt the public has not seen, if the military courts which tried them did—there was added to the campaign for the expulsion of the friars12 on account of their landed estates and of their stifling of intellectual freedom the demand that Philippine parishes be entrusted to a native priesthood. Only since American occupation has the demand for a national clergy found full expression, but it had for a quarter of a century before that been an important phase of the sentiment of nationality, a sentiment that was growing steadily, though slowly and in the main secretly until 1896 in the Tagálog provinces and 1898 in the archipelago at large.