Secularization Movement

Also known as: Secularization movement in the Philippines · Secularization of parishes · The campaign for the rights of Filipino priests · The secularization conflict

Society

Definition

The Secularization Movement was the campaign, running from the late eighteenth century through the nineteenth, by which Filipino secular priests sought appointment to the administration of the parishes of the Philippines — parishes then held in great part by the regular clergy, the Spanish friars of the religious orders, and progressively reassigned away from the native secular clergy. The policy opening came in 1774, when a royal decree directed that parishes vacated after the 1768 expulsion of the Jesuits be filled with secular priests, an order implemented by Governor-General Simon de Anda and resisted so violently by the orders in Pampanga that the colonial government itself petitioned for its end in 1787, and Spain revoked the policy in 1826. The movement’s native-led phase gathered force in the middle of the nineteenth century — Pedro Pelaez of Laguna and Mariano Gomez carried petitions to Queen Isabella II; the Jesuits’ return in 1859 and their retaking of Mindanao parishes from the Recollects in 1861 cost secular priests still more parishes, including parishes in Cavite; and in December 1870 Archbishop Gregorio Meliton Martinez himself wrote to the Spanish regent in support of secularization. (Wikipedia — Secularization movement) Its culmination and destruction came after the Cavite mutiny of January 20, 1872, when the colonial regime of Governor-General Rafael de Izquierdo blamed the movement’s leaders for the rising: Jose Burgos, Jacinto Zamora, and Mariano Gomez — the Gomburza — were garroted at Bagumbayan on February 17, 1872.

The conflict had a racial core. The secular clergy were mostly native — creoles, mestizos, and indios — while the regulars were overwhelmingly Spaniards; in the usage of the day, native priests were called indios, while “Filipino” still meant Spaniards born in the islands. Secularization was thus simultaneously a question of canon law — secular priests were, by the ordinary discipline of the Church, the proper pastors of settled parishes — and a question of race and power, which is why its crushing in 1872 is conventionally counted among the founding wounds of Filipino nationalism, the shock remembered in this wiki’s entries on the Gomburza, the Cavite mutiny, and the Propaganda Movement.

Identities

Authority	Value
Wikipedia	https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secularization_movement
Wikidata	N/A
DBpedia	http://dbpedia.org/page/Secularization_movement_in_the_Philippines
ProductOntology	N/A
Wiktionary	https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/secularization
Library of Congress Subject Headings	Secularization (Theology)
MeSH	N/A
NCBI Taxonomy	N/A
AGROVOC	N/A
Google Scholar	N/A
ConceptNet	N/A
OpenCyc	N/A

Also Known As

Secularization movement in the Philippines
Secularization of parishes
The campaign for the rights of Filipino priests
The secularization conflict

Examples and Analogies

A church-law grievance that became a national one: what began as a dispute over which kind of priest should hold a parish ended with three priests on a scaffold before forty thousand people — the juridical becoming the national, the way a local suit can set a constitutional precedent.
Three generations, one cause: Gomez, ordained in the 1820s, Pelaez, the scholar-administrator of mid-century, and Burgos, Pelaez’s militant disciple, carried the same brief across half a century — so that the garrote of 1872 struck the movement whole, at every age of its leadership.
Squeeze and backlash: every concession to one order squeezed the native seculars — Jesuits restored in 1859 took Recollect parishes, and Recollects were compensated with secular parishes in Cavite — a chain of transfers that kept the grievance alive until 1872 converted it into a prosecution.

Usage Scenarios

1. Teaching the Roots of Filipino Nationalism

Instructors use the movement as the ecclesiastical prelude to the Propaganda Movement: Jose Rizal, who witnessed the 1872 executions as a child, dedicated El filibusterismo to the three priests, and the generation of the Propaganda Movement wrote in the shadow of their deaths.

2. Studying the Gomburza Trial

Legal historians examine February 1872 as a case study in political justice — a verdict reached on the night of February 15, a sentence read at Fort Santiago the next morning, and an execution the following dawn — treated at length in this wiki’s entry on the Gomburza.

3. Tracing the Filipinization of the Church

Church historians follow the movement’s long afterlife: from the deprivations after 1872 to Pope Leo XIII’s Quae mari Sinico of 1902 urging a greater role for native clergy, the appointment of Jorge Barlin as the first Filipino bishop in 1905, and the founding of the Philippine Independent Church in 1902.

Strategies

Separate the three layers: the conflict ran simultaneously in canon law (seculars as proper pastors), in racial politics (native versus peninsular clergy), and in colonial politics (the friar orders as the mainstay of Spanish rule) — arguments that mix the three layers talk past one another.
Work from the documents of petition: the movement’s paper trail is explicit — royal decrees of 1774 and 1826, the 1849 reassignment decree, Pelaez’s published protests, the petitions to Isabella II, and Martinez’s December 1870 letter — each marking a turn in the campaign.
Read the two accounts of 1872 against each other: the Filipino account of Trinidad Pardo de Tavera, which saw a mere mutiny magnified into conspiracy, and the official account of Montero y Vidal and Izquierdo, which claimed an archipelago-wide plot — the divergence itself evidence for the student of colonial historiography.
Cross-reference the trial record: the canonical facts of the execution — the verdict, the sentence, the date, the site — are fixed in this wiki’s entries on the Gomburza and the Cavite mutiny.

Security and Safety Measures

Canonical safeguards: the movement worked through the Church’s own lawful channels — petitions to the Crown, appeals to Rome, and the archbishop’s authority — rather than outside them; Pelaez took the case to the Vatican and grounded his protest in the papal instruction Exponi nobis.
The archbishop’s refusal: after the executions, Archbishop Martinez declined to declare the three priests heretics, ordered the Manila Cathedral bells tolled for them, and refused to defrock them — the Church’s safeguard of canonical due process standing against the military verdict.
The counter-example of 1872: the regime’s sequence — a payroll mutiny converted within a week into death sentences and exiles — is studied precisely as the failure of safeguard: punishment of the many by association, and of the three by inference, on evidence their own archbishop would not condemn.

Historical Context

The movement’s first opening was royal rather than native. After King Charles III began subjugating the Church to the crown from 1759 and the Jesuits were expelled — the decree reached the islands in early 1768 — the Manila archbishop, Basilio Sancho de Santa Justa, launched the secularization of Philippine parishes as his project, recruiting native aspirants to the priesthood and founding a school for native boys bound for clerical life. (Wikipedia — Filipino nationalism) The native-led phase belongs to Pedro Pelaez — born in Pagsanjan, Laguna, on June 29, 1812, ordained in 1837, and for a time diocesan administrator of the Archdiocese of Manila. When a royal decree of 1849 transferred parishes from the secular — mostly Filipino — clergy to the Recollects and Dominicans, Pelaez protested anonymously in 1850 with El Clero Filipino, published in the Madrid press, and after the Jesuits’ return cost secular priests still more parishes, he founded with Francisco Gainza El Catolico Filipino, the first Catholic newspaper in the Philippines — a career cut short when the Manila Cathedral collapsed on him during the earthquake of June 3, 1863; his ideological mantle passed to his disciple Jose Burgos. (Wikipedia — Pedro Pelaez)

The violent culmination came fast. Found guilty on the night of February 15, 1872, their sentence read at Fort Santiago on February 16, Gomez, Zamora, and Burgos were executed by garrote at Bagumbayan on February 17, 1872, before some forty thousand witnesses — Gomez first, then Zamora, then Burgos — and buried in a common unmarked grave at Paco Cemetery, where remains believed to be theirs were found in 1978. (Wikipedia — Gomburza)

Challenges and Controversies

1872: The Backlash

The mutiny that destroyed the movement began on January 20, 1872, at Fort San Felipe, the arsenal in Cavite, when some two hundred soldiers and laborers under Sergeant Fernando La Madrid — their pay docked with tribute and the forced-labor fee ordered by Izquierdo — killed eleven Spanish officers and were crushed the next day. On January 27 Izquierdo approved death sentences for forty-one mutineers, twenty-eight later pardoned; others were exiled to the Marianas, among them Joaquin Pardo de Tavera, Antonio Regidor, and Jose Maria Basa; and the friar orders, eager to implicate the secular priests who threatened their parishes, fixed the conspiracy on Burgos and through him on Gomez and Zamora. (Wikipedia — 1872 Cavite mutiny)

One Mutiny, Two Histories

The historiography of 1872 divides at once: Pardo de Tavera’s account, a simple mutiny without separatist aim, magnified by the friars into a vast plot; and the official account of Montero y Vidal, endorsed by Izquierdo, of a conspiracy of native clergy, mestizos, and lawyers meant to overthrow Spanish rule and install Burgos or Zamora at the head of government. Every later assessment of the movement’s last years — and of the three priests’ guilt — passes through this divergence.

The Afterlife of the Cause

Secularization itself died as policy with the executions, and the Filipino secular clergy remained subordinate to the friar orders to the end of Spanish rule; only the American period and the Holy See brought the vindications — Quae mari Sinico, Barlin’s appointment, and in the schism of 1902 a Philippine Independent Church whose founding generation drew directly on the memory of 1872.