A Woman's Impression of the Philippines

by Mary H. Fee

When the Filipinos win a fight or an election, or fall heirs to any particular luck, they do not express their enthusiasm as we do in fire crackers, noise, and trades processions. They go sedately to church and sing the Te Deum. And as we enjoy the theatre, not merely for the play, but for the audience and its suggestions of a people who have put care behind them and have met to exhibit their material prosperity in silks and jewels, so do the Filipinos enjoy the splendor of the congregation on feast days. The women are robed as for balls in silken skirts of every hue—azure, rose, apple-green, violet, and orange. Their filmy camisas and pañuelos are painted in sprays of blossoms or embroidered in silks and seed pearls. On their gold-columned necks are diamond necklaces, and ropes of pearls half as big as bird’s eggs; while the black lace mantillas are fastened to their dusky heads by jewelled birds, and butterflies of emeralds, sapphires, and diamonds.

The first time I went to church in Capiz and looked down from the choir loft on the congregation, I could think of nothing but a kaleidoscope, and the colored motes that fall continually into new forms and shapes. When the results of the war had made themselves felt, and the cholera had ravaged the province, this variety of color was lost, and the congregation appeared a veritable house of mourning. This was not, however, due to the appalling mortality, but to the Filipinos’ punctilious habit of putting on mourning. When death visits a family, rich or poor, even the most distant relatives go into mourning, and they cling to it for the required time.

If the reader will take into consideration all that I have said about the part played by the Church in Filipino life, and at the same time consider their insular isolation, their lack of familiarity either through literature or travel with other civilizations, he will readily perceive that religion means a totally different thing in the Philippines from what it does in America, even in Roman Catholic America.

To the complacent Protestant evangelist who smacks his lips in anticipation of the future conquest of these Islands, I would say frankly that there is no room for Protestantism in the Philippines. The introspective quality which is inherent in true Protestantism is not in the Filipino temperament. Neither are the vein of simplicity and the dogmatic spirit which made the strength of the Reformation. Protestantism will, of course, make some progress so long as the fire is artificially fanned. There will always be found a few who cling ardently to it. But most Americans with whom I have talked (and their name is legion) have agreed with me in thinking that it will never be strong here.

The attitude of the Filipino Catholic is at once tolerant and positive. It is positive because without any research into theological disputes the ordinary Filipino is emotionally loyal to his Church and satisfied with the very positive promises which that Church gives him. It ministers not only to his spiritual but to his material needs on earth, and it promises him in no circumlocutory terms salvation or damnation. It either gives him or denies him absolution. He believes in it with the implicit faith of one who has never investigated. On the other hand, he is tolerant with the tolerance of one who has in his blood none of the acrimony begotten by an ancestry alternately conquerors and victims through their faith. The Filipino Catholic is far more tolerant than the Irish or German Catholic. But the Philippines have known no battle of the Boyne, no Thirty Years’ War. When the abuses of the friars here led to revolt and insurrection, the ultimate outcome of the struggle would have been probably a religious secession from Rome, as well as political severance from Spain, had not the accident of the Spanish-American War precipitated us upon the scene, and settled the matter by the immediate expulsion of the Spanish Government. The only real point of infection left to create a sore in the new body Filipino—the friar lands—was fortunately so treated by Secretary Taft that it ceased to menace the State or threaten to mingle religion with government.

The Filipinos are tolerant of Protestantism because to them it is still a purely religious and not a civil influence. They have not killed or been killed for religion; for it they have not burnt the homes of others, nor seen their own roof trees blaze; they have not gained power or office through religion; they have neither won nor lost elections through it. They have the same tolerance in religious matters that they have in regard to the Copernican Theory or Kepler’s Laws. Religion, as pure religion, unrelated to land or land titles, property or office, is no more the source of party animosity to them than to us. Secretary Taft was wise enough to see that, and eliminated the cause that threatened to make religion a vital question.

But if religion is not consciously vital to the Filipinos, as they themselves would conceive and act on it (and I make the assertion in the assumption that the reader understands as I do by consciously vital that for which the individual or the race is willing to die singly or collectively), the unprejudiced observer must admit that it is vital to their ultimate evolution, vital in just the sense that any function is vital to one who is in need of it. As I said before, they are not essentially a religious people; but the early Spanish discoverers prescribed religion as a doctor prescribes a missing ingredient in the food of an invalid, and the Filipinos have benefited thereby, Roman Catholicism is just what the Filipino needs. He has no zest for morbid introspection, he does not feel the need of bearing testimony to cosmic truth, and in his lack of feeling that need is just as helpless as the man whose system cannot manufacture the necessary amount of digestive juices or red blood corpuscles; he is an invalid, who must be supplied artificially with what his system lacks.

I am quite sure that the Catholic clergy, as represented by the American Archbishop, bishops, and priests, are certain that Protestantism holds no threats for the Church in the Philippines other than that it may be the opening wedge in a schism which will send the Filipino not only out of the Church, but to rationalism of the most Voltairian hue. When danger really threatens the Church in the Philippines, it will be no half-way danger. The Filipino will be orthodox as he is now, formally, positively orthodox, or he will be cynically heterodox. As God made him, he might in time have arrived at the philosophy of Omar, “Drink, for ye know not why or when,” or the identical philosophy of Epicurus, “Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die.” But the Church found him, and recognizing his peculiarities artfully substituted her own phrase, “Eat and drink in peace, for to-morrow you die in the full knowledge that pertains to your salvation.” Let no proselyting evangelist delude himself with the idea that the Filipino has the mental bias which leads him to think, “Let me neither eat nor drink till I know whence I came and whither I go.” That is the spirit of true Protestantism, which discovers a new light on faith every decade and still is seeking, seeking for the perfect light.

But if the Church in the Philippines is in no real danger from Protestantism, it is in more or less imminent danger from two sources—the necessity for reform in the Church itself, and the growing national sense of the Filipinos, which leads them to demand their own clergy, and to resent to the point of secession a too firm hold by the new American clergy.