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Source:
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The severity of the Government in meting out punishment to those suspected of implication in the Cavite disturbance had a deep and lasting effect upon the natives. They knew that it was due to the insistence of the friars, who had by this time established so complete an influence over the civil authorities that the former were justly held responsible for most of the abuses under which the people suffered. The ecclesiasties were the open opponents of reform, and from the inception of the Colony had thwarted most movements in that direction, whether emanating from the local, or the national, government. Toward the close of the Spanish régime in the islands, the friars had become fully aware of the widespread hatred for themselves which existed among all classes of the natives. The knowledge seems to have goaded them to a greater display of arrogance and to wholesale reprisals against all whom they knew or suspected to be inimical. Freemasonry had been introduced to the Philippines about ten years before the Cavite outbreak. The Roman Catholic Church is everywhere opposed to secret societies, and to the Freemasons most of all.
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updated: November 23, 1997 APSIS Editor Johann Stockinger | |