The Imperial Church by Katherine D. Moran

Author:Katherine D. Moran
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cornell University Press

Catholicism as Colonial Control

Americans on secular assignments in the Philippines consistently parted with their Protestant missionary brethren, claiming that Filipinos would—and should—remain Catholic. Catholicism, they argued, was the religion best suited to what they believed to be the racial character of Filipinos. It was also, observers noted, a potent source of imperial control. Even amid the widespread antifriar sentiment discussed in the previous chapter, many Americans—both Catholic and Protestant—claimed that good friars played a key role in colonial administration. Their attention to the connection between the church and social control pervaded American arguments about the value of friars, and even inflected their descriptions of Catholic celebrations and processions. Everywhere around them they saw evidence of the church’s role in establishing and maintaining an orderly society.

Fred W. Atkinson, for example, the educator from Massachusetts who became the first general superintendent of education in the Philippines, argued that Catholicism was “the religion best suited to the temperament, spirit, and character of the various Filipino races.”4 He remained vague about what he meant by Filipino racial “character,” but others were more explicit. Though some struck out rather wildly—Jacob Isselhard, the author of the self-published Filipino in Every-Day Life (1904) and himself a Catholic, claimed that the church’s numerous holidays made it “an institution well adapted to the Filipino’s inherent aversion for work”—the most common explanation cast Catholicism as a gilded version of Christianity.5 In the Philippines as elsewhere, Protestantism was described (by Protestants) as a religion of text and reason, and Catholicism as a religion of surface and form—of grand architecture and decoration, of pleasing ritual, and of holy images—which made it particularly appropriate for a putatively irrational people. Adjutant Ebenezer Hannaford made just this point. In his lavishly illustrated, magazine-style History and Description of the Picturesque Philippines with Entertaining Accounts of the People and Their Modes of Living, Customs, Industries, Climate and Present Conditions (1900), he told his readers that “the ritualism and gorgeous splendor characterizing the rites of Roman Catholicism were exactly suited to attract the show-loving, impressible native.”6 Isselhard struck an almost identical note: “The Filipino,” he wrote, “… is very imaginative, is easily influenced by outward appearances and pompous displays, and, therefore, the decorative ritualism peculiar to the Roman Church impresses him.”7

In declaring that Catholicism’s appropriateness for Filipinos was rooted in its pomp and imagery, these writers were also saying that Catholic forms were particularly suited to influencing the Filipino mind. American Protestant writers did not cast these forms—as they often did when talking, for example, about travel to European Catholic sites—as sublime and impressive, capable of seducing even the most wary observer.8 In the Philippines, they argued that the attraction of Catholic form and ritual was felt most intensely by Filipinos—evidence not of the particular magnetism of Catholicism but rather of “the Filipino’s” particular receptivity to such displays. In Isselhard’s and Atkinson’s formulations, the Filipino believer was presumed to be “easily influenced,” a “show-loving, impressible native.” The issue was not one of the Catholic Church’s intrinsic attractions, but of its sway over Filipinos in particular.

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