The Philippine Revolution and the Geography of Schism

Abstract

the archipelago but were ultimately defeated by the military forces of the United States. A major component and outgrowth of the revolutionary fervor of the era was a movement to transfer leadership in the Roman Catholic church in the Philippines from Spaniards to Filipinos. In 1902 this led to schism. The nationalist religious movement diffused rapidly but unevenly, assuming a far-flung and complex pattern of adherence. By I918 a similar distribution of Protestant adherence had emerged as a result of proselytism by American missionaries. The major themes of the geography of religion have much to contribute to an understanding of these phenomena: analysis of expansion and transfer, regionalization of nominal adherence patterns over time, and the role of religion in ordering circulation and reinforcing regional identities.1 Even greater insight can be achieved by employing various measures that elicit regional variations in the intensity of conventional religious practice.2 In this essay I adopt such an approach, and use the relative rates at which provincial bodies of Catholics produced priests in the late nineteenth century as well as the varied regional nature of the Hispanic colonial church to understand the peculiar geography assumed by the schismatic movement. The methodology and the nature of the insights reached should prove useful in other cultural geographical contexts. The social geographical base on which the changes of the 1898-1918 period were enacted was formed during the 330 years of Spanish rule. Hispanic administrative and religious colonialism restricted Islam to the southwestern portion of the archipelago and established among the highly localized lowland societies of Luzon and the Visayas (the central islands) an extensive system of mission settlements. Outliers of this system were located on the northern coast of Mindanao. Along with improvements in communications and economic change, the mission-cum-parish system ultimately produced an increasingly well articulated Christianized society. In the