Philippine Catholicism — Era-8 Segment

By the middle of the seventeenth century the Philippines were the one substantially Christian society in East or Southeast Asia, and its basic unit was the friar parish: a Spanish religious — Augustinian, Dominican, Franciscan, Recollect or Jesuit — often the only Spaniard in a town, holding both spiritual and civil authority over a population whose language he had learned and which he alone among the officials could preach in. Filipino Christianity took its own shape inside that arrangement, above all in the pasyon, a long verse narrative of Christ's passion in the vernacular, chanted by ordinary people through Holy Week in their own houses. The earliest surviving text dates from 1704, and the practice continues. The century's strains were institutional: a long fight over whether bishops could inspect the friars' parishes, the British occupation of Manila in 1762-64, the expulsion of the Jesuits in 1768, and above all the question of whether Filipino secular priests could hold parishes at all. Which became the great grievance of the century that followed.