Colonial Catholicism

Five hundred years ago, in 1521, occurred the first recorded encounter between natives of this archipelago and the conquistadors from the Iberian Peninsula. Another forty-four years passed before Spain occupied these islands on a permanent basis. The Spanish conquest undoubtedly altered the geography of human settlements in this archipelago as Spain imposed the reducción policy, which bodily aggregated the colonial subjects into clustered spaces that had as their epicenter the local church. We took it for granted that this policy affected the living. But Xavier Huetz de Lemps, in his professorial address, evokes the policy’s impact on the dead. Given the contradictory responses of the colonized natives to Spanish rule and to Catholicism as a way of life, many acquiesced to Spanish Catholic notions of death and burial rituals, while others offered stiff resistance—a historical process that has yet to be narrativized. But colonial subjects who embraced Catholicism did inter their dead in the campo santo, the patch of walled earth adjacent to the church that sanctioned and sanctified it. In time the natives evolved elaborate rituals for burying their dead and commemorating them on the First of November every year.

Huetz de Lemps analyzes Spanish colonial policies on graveyards and the geography of the dead, demonstrating that the Catholic cemetery became a bone of contention between secular civil and church authorities starting in the late eighteenth century, when the former began to intervene in a sphere that until then had been the prerogative of the latter. Influenced by Enlightenment sensibilities, secular authorities introduced measures to relocate graveyards to the outskirts of towns and prohibit burials within church buildings in the name of public hygiene and sanitation—the need for which was reinforced by the series of cholera epidemics that erupted in the course of the nineteenth century. In this tussle, the church granted concessions in order to retain exclusive jurisdiction over cemeteries and the attendant revenues. The church’s necro-power was also challenged by the civil authorities’ approval of Protestant cemeteries (advocated by European diplomats) and Chinese cemeteries (that mingled Catholics and non-Catholics). By the 1880s funerals and graveyards were a magnet for contestations over friar power, but the top secular and religious powerholders were cognizant of the risks of politicizing burial issues in the face of a budding Philippine nationalism.

While Huetz de Lemps portrays a largely defensive Catholic Church in the nineteenth century, Alexandre Coello delves into the internal dynamics of the colonial church in the late seventeenth century, when as an institution it was unchallenged. Yet in its hegemonic state the church was festering with factionalism and strife among different Spanish stakeholders. Coello uses as a case study the cabildo (cathedral chapter) of Manila, when Fr. Ginés de Barrientos, the Dominican auxiliary bishop, occupied the post rendered vacant by the death on 31 December 1689 of the archbishop, Felipe Fernández de Pardo, also a Dominican. The younger and ambitious members of the cabildo supported Barrientos; opposing them were the dean, the cabildo’s most important dignitary, who sought to abide by the rules; the chanter; and the treasurer. The usurper proceeded to appoint officials in the archbishopric and imprison and even excommunicate his opponents. At the same time, the governor general, who determined the cabildo’s membership by virtue of the Patronato Real (Royal Patronage), did not fill the vacant see and intervene to settle the conflict. On 7 April 1690, about three months after the archbishop’s death, Barrientos convened a meeting in which he planned to compel the dean to agree to his ascent to power, but the dean’s faction recovered control of the church while many of Barrientos’s supporters fled. Although the Philippines had a new governor by July 1690, five more years lapsed before the colony’s chief official formally requested the king to annul Barrientos’s appointment as interim governor of the vacant see of Manila. Coello shows that cabildo members were thoroughly enmeshed with the resident Spanish community, and their ties of kinship, friendship, and patronage shaped the factionalism and even corruption in the cabildo.

The two...