I have now posted the English translation of the novenary of the Iglesia Filipina Independiente under the documents tab on this website.
The translation was published a year after the Tagalog translation. It was again printed by Isabelo de los Reyes in Manila. The printing of the English version is of much poorer quality. The translator is invisible, as is so often the case.
I am still hard at work on my thesis. I have been collecting relevant primary source materials during my research, many of which I have scanned as Adobe PDF files. I intend to begin making some of these materials available here.
The first item which I am posting is a Novenary of the Iglesia Filipina Independiente. Originally written by Gregorio Aglipay in Spanish, this text was translated into Tagalog by Juan N. Evangelista and published in 1925 in Manila by Isabelo de los Reyes.
The text is fascinating. It walks through, in the nine days of a novena, a series of scientific, critical, and rational ideas; it instructs the participant in ideas of evolution and natural selection and a historical-critical approach to the Bible and theology.
You can access the entire text from the Documents tab of this website.
John Schumacher. Revolutionary Clergy: The Filipino Clergy and the Nationalist Movement, 1850-1903. Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 1981.
John Schumacher’s Revolutionary Clergy is an important work which leaves me with mixed feelings. The book is ultimately deeply and irretrievably flawed. I find myself wondering how much of the remarkable research that Schumacher conducted was skewed or distorted by his deep-seated aversion to Mabini, de los Reyes and Aglipay.
Schumacher studies the role of the Filipino clergy in generating, shaping and sustaining nationalism and nationalist movements in the period from 1850-1903. Nationalism, he argues, first emerged as a potent idea and force in the clergy in particular in the person of
Schumacher points to what he considers to be an incredibly important rift in the Philippine revolutionary forces – a rift between clerical/Catholic nationalism and anti-clerical/secular nationalism. The latter nationalism was endorsed by the Malolos government, particularly by the person of Mabini. Under Mabini, the Ilokano cleric, Gregorio Aglipay led the efforts of the Malolos government to implement a policy of subsuming the Philippine church to the revolutionary government. This subsumption occurred especially at the level of the appoint of priests and bishops and the appropriation of revolutionary funds. Through all of these activities Aglipay acted as a pawn, an instrument, of Mabini. The role of Mabini was later taken up by Isabelo de los Reyes after the surrender of the Malolos forces to the Americans. De los Reyes pushed the clerics loyal to Aglipay to form a new, independent church – the Iglesia Filipina Independiente – and finally succeeded in creating a ‘schism’ from the Catholic church.
The opposite, positive, pole to the negative presentation of Aglipay is Mariano Sevilla. Sevilla is the head of what Schumacher terms the loyalist-nationalist forces. He presents this group as acting from much purer motives than the Aglipayan ‘schismatics.’ Loyal to the ‘Holy See’ but nationalist at the same time, the loyalist-nationalist group worked for the rights of the Filipino clergy to the posts left vacant by the Spanish friars and against the return of these friars. Many disputes occurred and one nearly resulted in a schism in Jaro. As the paternalistic intentions of the Americans became clear, Schumacher argues, i.e., their intentions to provide the Filipino clergy with the necessary education and training and then provide them with posts, the loyalist-nationalist movement agreed to cooperate with the American regime.
Continue reading ‘John Schumacher’s Revolutionary Clergy: a review’
Mary E. Hobgood, Catholic Social Teaching and Economic Theory: Paradigms in Conflict (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991).
Paul Misner, Social Catholicism in Europe: From the Onset of Industrialization to the First World War (New York: Crossroad Publishing Co., 1991).
Barbara E. Wall, “Rerum Novarum and its Critics on Social and Sexual Hierarchies,” in F. McHugh, ed., Things Old and New: Catholic Social Teaching Revisited (New York: University Press of America, 1993).
It was with the papal encyclical Rerum Novarum in 1891 that a longstanding convergence of theology and politics was given explicit dogmatic
formulation. The fascinating and uneasy confluence of social and economic theory on the one hand, and religious and theological instruction on the other, was at last made explicit. This explicit confluence is problematic to its core; conflicting ideological bents and hierarchical goals led to a document with an interpretive malleability that left it largely useless.
Rerum Novarum represented a venture on the part of the papacy and, by tenuous extrapolation, of the Roman Catholic church writ large, to formulate a politically expedient stance vis-a-vis the shifting world of late nineteenth century capitalism. I argue that by dramatically adapting Thomistic thought on property while retaining Thomism’s Aristotelian notions of an organic society, the papacy attempted to shift its class alliances, aligning itself with its erstwhile opponent, the bourgeoisie, in the face of the perceived threat of socialism.
Rerum Novarum provides the historian with a fascinating, and frequently overlooked, window on late nineteenth century religion and politics. Resting as it does on the troublesome cusp of theology and history, it has either been conveniently ignored or myopically interpreted. In this article I will survey three studies of this encyclical, two published during Rerum Novarum’s centenary in 1991 and one in 1993. By examining these three recent accounts of the encyclical, and their at times widely divergent readings of this document and its historical significance, we can gain a sense of both the possibilities for historical investigation and the potential pitfalls of existing historiography.
Without drawing distinctions too sharply it can be said that these three accounts approach the subject from three different perspectives, the more strictly historical, the sociological and the theological.
Epic of Evolution: Seven Ages of the Cosmos by Eric J. Chaisson
A Brief History of Neoliberalism by David Harvey
My System: 21st Century Edition by Aron Nimzowitsch
Their Morals and Ours by Leon Trotsky
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