T.r. : The Last Romantic (9781541618039) by Brands H. W

Author:Brands, H. W. [BRANDS, H. W.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hachette Book Group USA
Published: 2019-07-23T00:00:00+00:00

V

While Roosevelt’s baiting of southern Democrats was deliberate, his antagonizing of another group—American Catholics—was accidental. Events in the Philippines triggered this controversy as well. In pursuit of McKinley’s astonishing pledge to “Christianize” the Filipinos, American administrators in the islands discovered what anyone with any historical perspective already knew: that the job had been done long before by Spanish missionaries. In bringing (Catholic) Christianity to the Philippines, the Spanish friars had simultaneously acquired title to large tracts of Philippine real estate. The current American governor-general, William Howard Taft, recalled that popular antipathy to the friars had helped precipitate the anti-Spanish rebellion that preceded the American occupation, and in any event he desired to remove this vestige of European feudalism. Taft and his associates sought to break up the religious orders’ estates by purchasing them and redistributing the land to the peasants who worked it. This would simultaneously serve the second purpose of encouraging the Spanish friars to go back to Spain; American priests would take their place.

Unfortunately for Taft, and for Roosevelt, the friars resisted this encroachment of the temporal sphere into what they interpreted as the realm of religion. They appealed to the pope in Rome for support, and their appeal echoed among American Catholics—a largely Democratic constituency and one always difficult for Roosevelt. As usual Roosevelt had trouble finding any merit in his opponents’ case. He told Archbishop John Ireland that he was “very indignant” at the Catholic criticism, not least since his administration’s policy toward the friars followed suggestions by Ireland himself. To another Catholic acquaintance he declared, “I am pained and concerned to find that a large number of Catholics seem to feel that the movement to get rid of the friars is in some way a movement against the Catholic Church by the government at Washington.” Nothing could be further from the truth. It was the fact that the friars were Spanish, not that they were friars, that was the source of the problem, for the Filipinos had an historical hatred of the Spanish priests and still harbored “the most bitter indignation” against them. “If only these Spanish friars could be taken away, then their places can be at once taken by friars of other nationalities or by other orders of priests to whom the people will listen.” As always his administration had nothing in mind but the best interests of the Filipinos—the great majority of whom were, of course, Catholic. “We have been endeavoring in all these matters to meet the wishes of the catholic population of the Philippine Islands.”

Roosevelt grew more irritated the more he thought about the Spanish friars—“a lecherous lot of scoundrels,” he called them in a less diplomatic moment—but upon due reflection he determined to approach the problem calmly, and in the spirit of J. P. Morgan, of all people. He sent his man, Taft, to see the friars’ man, Pope Leo XIII. Taft found the pontiff surprisingly agreeable. “The old boy is quite bubbling with humor,” he noted afterward. “He was as lively as a cricket.

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