In late October 1841 some 500 members of a pious association of lay Catholics were killed in battle by Spanish forces in the colonial Philippines. When surviving members of the group were questioned as to the purpose of their uprising, they responded, “To pray.” This paper attempts to unpack this statement by placing the Cofradía in the broader history of the Church's response to expressions of popular piety. Under what circumstances are the devotional practices of the laity tolerated by or incorporated into the Church, and under what conditions are they suppressed? Why was the Cofradía's membership determined to pray, up to the point of violent confrontation and death, and what made this desire so threatening to Spanish authorities that the group had to be met with violence? What can this case tell us about the modern relationship between Church and State, or religion and politics?
The Cofradía is a well known movement in the Philippines arising in the contentious historical period in which modernity as a conceptual and institutional reality emerges. The several decades around the turn of the nineteenth century saw the attempt to synchronize the Philippines with the commercial demands of an expanding world economy, as well as the emergence of liberalism and a nascent Spanish nation-state. The small body of scholarship on the Cofradía has generally understood the group as a "folk Catholic" movement, an expression of the syncretism of indigenous and Catholic beliefs, as well as an inarticulate expression of Filipino political nationalism in its incipient stages (the country would wage a successful nationalist revolution against Spain at the end of the century). If the group is treated comparatively it tends to be understood in one of two ways: as part of a "Little Tradition" of peasant protest throughout the colonial period in the Philippines, or as an expression of "millenarianism" common to different "folk" religious traditions of Southeast Asia, a politico-religious form which tends to irrupt during periods of political or social tension. The Cofradía has also been understood as a response to changing economic conditions, in particular the transition from subsistence to commercial agriculture. Several scholars have also provided astute analyses of the group's heterodox Catholic theology and organizational structure, which can be gleaned from the letters exchanged between the leaders that were confiscated after their defeat.
My research responds to several misapprehensions and gaps prevalent in existing scholarship on the Cofradía. First is the set of assumptions issuing from the idea that the Cofradía was comprised mainly of peasants. Recent scholarship has revealed that the group was actually relatively wealthy and partially urbanized, which challenges the notion that it was an expression of "folk Catholicism" or indicative of patters of thought characteristic of the lower classes. Secondly, so far no attempt has been made in the scholarship to situate the Cofradía in conditions which reach beyond their immediate local, national, or regional circumstances. My project attempts to rectify this by viewing the Cofradía rather as an entry into the contestations and debates stemming from and resulting in Reformation, Enlightenment, Liberalism, and the development of the modern nation-state—global-historical transformations that appear in the scholarship, if at all, as processes far-removed from the activities of a few thousand peasants attempting to hold a novena in a colonial backwater.
In particular, this paper expands our understanding of the Cofradía's actions by treating it as a case study in the historical development of popular Catholic piety, and especially in how the Church's changing response to the devotional excesses of the laity coincides with a new political regime—secularism—in which religion is domesticated by the state and confined to the private sphere. I argue that the attribution of the category "folk" to a religious community or practice is always an expression of the workings of power; in the same way that "heresy" has historically served as a boundary marker both separating the proper from the improper and reinforcing the authority of the institutions tasked with demarcating these spheres, so too does the academic exercise of classifying religion as "folk" reinforce a particular understanding of "religion" at the same time that it empowers a certain class of individuals—professional scholars—to define these categories for historical subjects who understood their actions in their own way.
The Cofradía declared itself Catholic, not "folk" Catholic, and my paper attempts to see the group not as a local deviation from orthodox Catholicism, but as a potential universal—as Catholicism with no modifier. Situating the Cofradía in the longue durée of popular Catholicism shows that it is similar to other groups in the history of Christendom, in its theology, its organizational structure, and so on. However, it arose in a period in which, on the one hand, the Philippine Church's stance toward popular piety was shifting from one of accommodation and flexibility to one of punitiveness and rigidity. On the other hand, contemporary political developments in the Iberian peninsula had produced an assault by the monarchical governments on the Church's purview of authority, developments which would eventually lead to the establishment of the liberal nation-state. I argue that the Cofradía presented a particular challenge to the governing authorities because it occurred during this period of transition. I argue further that the Cofradía had to be crushed for this regime to be actualized; in other words, the consolidation of a political order premised on the state's domestication and control of religion could not be effected without the suppression of groups whose religious activity exceeded the bounds laid out for it by the state.
In late October 1841 some 500 members of a pious association of lay Catholics were killed in battle by Spanish forces in the colonial Philippines. When surviving members of the group were questioned as to the purpose of their uprising, they responded, “To pray.” This paper attempts to unpack this statement by placing the Cofradía in the broader history of the Church's response to expressions of popular piety. Under what circumstances are the devotional practices of the laity tolerated by or incorporated into the Church, and under what conditions are they suppressed? Why was the Cofradía's membership determined to pray, up to the point of violent confrontation and death, and what made this desire so threatening to Spanish authorities that the group had to be met with violence? What can this case tell us about the modern relationship between Church and State, or religion and politics?