From The Making of the Modern Philippines: Pieces of a Jigsaw State, by Philip Bowring (Bloomsbury Academic, 2022), Kindle pp. 29-31:
The nineteenth century saw a sustained clash between the religious needs of the Filipinos and the colonialist views of the Spanish Church, the friars in particular. Nationalism had its roots in this conflict.
Tension between the Spanish-led Church and peasant Catholics led to the creation of the all-Filipino Cofradia de San Jose in Central Luzon by Apolinario de la Cruz, better known as Hermano Pule, who had wanted to join the Dominican order but was barred because of his race. Becoming a lay preacher, he and a Filipino priest established the Cofradia de San Jose, attached to a hospital. It gradually attracted several thousand followers and only admitted Spanish and mestizos personally approved by Pule. It combined Catholic teaching with some pre-colonial ideas. Refused recognition by both State and Church, it was seen by the governor-general as implicitly political and was violently suppressed. In a battle with followers, troops killed several hundred and Pule and other leaders were captured and executed; Pule was just twenty-seven years old. Madrid was shocked and eventually the Supreme Court admonished the governor-general saying the Cofradia was not political but had merely committed an ecclesiastical offence, but the damage had been done.
The country was in the curious position of having become devout believers in Christ while increasingly despising the Church’s principal agents the friars, the mendicants who had grown rich and greedy. In 1858, a British visitor was entertained to a dinner which would have ‘satisfied a Parisian gourmand’ meanwhile also noting that local Spanish ‘newspapers were more pre-occupied with the lives of saints than the most stirring events of the political world’.
At the same time, the Church saw growing divides between its mostly Spanish clergy and both the local priests and their flocks. The government did make efforts to extend primary education with its own schools in addition to the clerical schools but with a focus on teaching Christianity. The friars tended to ignore government demands that they teach Spanish to the Indios fearing that it would give them access to new, often secular, ideas.
In 1870, of 792 parishes, 611 were administered by the orders while the rest were controlled by secular priests, most of whom were Filipinos. The confrontation between the two sparked a surge of local identity. Political swings in Madrid exacerbated issues as a liberal governor was replaced by a conservative. A minor uprising in a Cavite shipyard was used by the government, egged on by the friars, to accuse three outspoken local priests – Fathers Burgos, Gomez and Zamora – to be tried for plotting rebellion and executed. Others were imprisoned or exiled to the Marianas. Well-to-do supporters exiled themselves to Spain.
The deaths of the three priests were a landmark. Burgos, the son of a Spanish officer and a local mestiza, was highly educated, so too were Gomez and Zamora, mestizos educated at the University of Santo Tomas. All deeply resented the inferior position of the non-Spanish clergy.
This episode fuelled the wrath of an upcoming generation of prospering new class of mestizos, elite Indios and creoles (local born Spanish) who could be educated in Europe but who at home felt the heavy hand of racist officials and the Guardia Civil. From this elite, known as ilustrados (the enlightened) emerged the Propagandists, a movement aiming not for independence but for equal treatment as citizens and representation in the Cortes (parliament) in Madrid as Cuba and Puerto Rica had been given. They also demanded the ending of the friars’ role in government, their replacement by local priests, more mass education, the curtailment of foreign – notably Chinese – economic power and a fairer tax system – the Spanish did not pay tax.
Gathering gradual momentum from 1880, by 1889 the movement was embedded among young ilustrados in Spain who published La Solidaridad, a fortnightly newspaper. The names of those involved are celebrated by street names throughout the country – Marcelo del Pilar, a lawyer, who wrote tracts in Tagalog as well as Spanish, Mariano Ponce, Juan Luna, a painter, and his brother Antonio, a future general, but most noted even then was Jose Rizal, a mestizo from Calamba near Manila whose elder brother had been a friend of Father Burgos. Rizal, a name he adopted, was fluent in several languages, a medical doctor and a writer whose first novel, Noli Me Tangere published in 1887, was a searing attack on the regime in Manila and on the friars.
Far Outliers 