“It is not surprising that the great religious corporations are enormously wealthy, and that they have a power consonant with that wealth. I was shocked at the stories I was told by men, whose word I could not doubt, of the flagrant immorality of the Spanish Friars. The men who gave me these statements said they were prepared to give names, dates, and places.”
We sent a cutting containing this part of the report to the ex-Philippine missionary, residing at present in Rome, to whom we have already referred.
To these lying statements the missionary gives an unqualified contradiction. He himself was a parish priest during the cholera of 1882–83, when 20,000 people died in six months. In his own parish alone 1,829 died and were buried, and yet he did not get a penny for burial fees. He adds that the other parish priests acted like himself.
The revolting description of the treatment of the dead in the Paco cemetery is a foolish fabric, built on the simple fact that bodies are removed from certain niches, after five years, to make room for others. Mr. Hykes indirectly imputes the extortion of enormous burial fees in this cemetery to the clergy. Whether the fees are enormous or not, they do not go to the Church; for the missionary Father reveals the fact wilfully kept back by Mr. Hykes—that the cemetery belongs to the Manila municipality, which gets all the fees. This cemetery story, told with such apparent honest indignation, is alone sufficient to discredit all Mr. Hyke’s report, and is a proof that he knows how to color and misrepresent facts to suit his purpose.
In conclusion, we are anxious to know if Mr. Hykes examined the spiritual condition of the Protestants in the Philippines. “To our shame be it said,” observed a British officer, in 1859, “there is no Protestant place of worship on the island; and even the burial-ground is in an unseemly position and condition, and, I believe, unconsecrated.”[1]
[1] “Hongkong to Manila,” by H. T. Ellis, R.N.
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