Philippine Confraternities in Global-Historical Context: The Case of the Cofradía de San José

The Cofradía de San José, a pious association of lay Catholics in the colonial Philippines, was violently crushed by the Spanish state in 1841. This uprising is a standard event in Philippine history textbooks and the subject of a small but influential body of scholarly literature on Philippine religious movements. However, none of this work considers the history or significance of the confraternity form itself. Meanwhile, confraternities in Europe and Latin America have been the subject of extensive scholarly discussion, yet Philippine confraternities have been almost completely ignored in this literature. This paper is the first to interpret the Cofradía de San José as a confraternity, the most prominent organizational form in the early modern Catholic world. It attempts to fill gaps in literature on both Philippine Catholicism and early modern confraternities, and to consider the significance of this uprising in the context of global Catholicism’s turbulent entrance to modernity.