Dont you know by now this is FR, where any article more than 3 paragraphs long is anathema!
Wher are the Cliff notes? :)
I thought the Phillipnes went muslim some time again. (Semi sarc)
Working with Filipinos overseas my impression was that they weren’t merely catholic by birth and tradition but in fact were believers, who held regular worship services among themselves.
Elsewhere, where churches were available, you can bet they were in church.
Another place I worked stateside, they held weekly lunch Bible studies, and though the study was evangelical-oriented, most of the attendees were Filipino Catholics. They weren’t hung up on the evangelical-catholic divide, they just seem to love talking about their faith.
And I saw something sometime back that one of the evangelical denominations had a big school in the Philippines training missionaries for service in very difficult parts of the world; they said Filipinos were among the best for that kind of service. There is something in Philippine character, a kind of resiliency combined with religious devotion. They are nice people but tough. And when they believe, they Believe.
This is the type of automatic, knee-jerk Marxist narrative which must be thrown into any historical analysis of colonial peoples and the 3rd world. Statements like this are an unquestioned article of faith in Western/American university history departments. They are so prevalent they have become, IMHO, pathetic cliches
A ‘legend’ over here is that when the Spanish Catholic missionaries deployed, they found the people practicing a remarkably familiar form of the Faith in some places.
Possibly this can be attributed to the Chinese-Philippines trade, ongoing for centuries before the arrival of Magellan. Marco Polo had opened up lines of communication between China and Europe some four hundred years earlier, and a form of Catholicism may have “tricked down” to the filipinos as a result of those trade connections.