RECOLLECTIONS OF FULL YEARS
but underlying them all was the immediate necessity for the establishment of tranquillity and confidence throughout the archipelago.
In order to make clear, in any degree, the Philippine situation as we found it, it is essential that, briefly, the position of the Catholic Church and its representatives, the Friars, be explained. For the first time in its history the American government found itself compelled to adjust a seemingly insurmountable difficulty between a church and its people.
With us the Church is so completely separate from the State that it is difficult to imagine cases in which policy of a church in the selection of its ministers, and the assignment of them to duty could be regarded as of political moment, or as a proper subject of comment in the report of a public officer, but in the first reports of the Philippine Commission to Washington this subject had to be introduced with emphasis.
The Spanish government of the Philippine Islands was a government by the Church through its monastic orders, nothing less. In the words of the Provincial of the Augustinians, the Friars were the "pedestal or foundation of the sovereignty of Spain" which being removed "the whole structure would topple over." The Philippine people, with the exception of the Mohammedan Moros and the non-Christian tribes, belonged, during the Spanish dominion, to the Roman Catholic Church, and the Church registry of 1898 showed a total membership of 6,559,998. The parishes and missions, with few exceptions, were administered by Spanish Friars of the Dominican, Augustinian and Franciscan orders, and it was to the nature of this administration that Spain owed the insurrections of 1896 and 1898, the latter of which was terminated only upon our assuming control of the islands.
In 1896 there were in the Philippines 1,124 monks of the
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