RECOLLECTIONS OF FULL YEARS
While the people loved catholicism, the failure of the Vatican to accede to their wishes with respect to the Friars, as expressed by the American Commission to Rome, added impetus to the rebellious movement and when the announcement of the new organisation was made it was found to be based on the strongest kind of support. Aglipay constituted himself Obispo Maximo, assumed a fine regalia, and conferred upon fifteen or more of his lieutenants the regular church dignities and titles of a lesser order. He offered the people the same ceremonies, the same relief, the same confessional, and the same faith generally to which they had always been accustomed, so they found it easy enough to transfer their allegiance, and the new church gained adherents with such startling rapidity that it seemed as if a majority of the population would go over to it.
The result may easily be imagined. The Roman Catholic organisation had controlled Philippine affairs, both temporal and spiritual, for so long that the possibility of a rebellion of this character had never been thought of. Every loyal Catholic, and especially every bishop and priest and friar, was horrified, and an almost frantic controversy began to rage about the devoted head of the civil Governor as soon as he arrived in Manila. He was appealed to to take drastic action to suppress the movement and because he could do nothing even to check it the American government was reviled in the Catholic press as it had never been reviled before. Mr. Taft calmly met the storm with an iteration and reiteration of American principles of religious toleration, and declared that he had neither right nor wish to try to direct the religious inclinations of the people, and that all he could do in the matter was to enforce the keeping of the peace.
The people had been taught by Aglipay and his fellow-conspirators, and, indeed, by the whole history of church buildings in the Islands, that church properties belonged to the people and that if they wished to do so it was right for
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