Spain was in the throes of revolution, with anti-clerical
liberals arrayed against clerical conservatives. The restored Society had barely returned to
Spain when it was again expelled in 1822.
Readmitted, it was suppressed by royal decree in 1834; restored in
virtue of a concordat with the Holy See in 1851; expelled a third time in 1868;
and permanently legalized in 1880.
The suppression of the Jesuits in the Philippines covering
the whole Spanish Empire (1767) as well as the various European monarchies is a
complex topic. Analysis of the reasons is complicated by the political
maneuvering in each country which was not carried on in the open but has left
some trail of evidence. The papacy reluctantly went along with the demands of
the various Catholic kingdoms involved, and advanced no theological reason for
the suppression. The power and wealth of the Jesuits with their influential
educational system was confronted by adversaries in this time of cultural
change in Europe, leading to the revolutions that would follow. Monarchies attempting to centralize and
secularize political power viewed the Jesuits as being too international, too
strongly allied to the papacy, and too autonomous from the monarchs in whose
territory they operated. Soon after
their restoration by Pope Pius VII in 1814 they slowly began returning to most
of the places from which they had been expelled.
Soon, after one its short-lived restorations, the Jesuit
Province of Spain was specifically asked by Queen Isabela II to return to the
Philippines to undertake, or rather to resume the evangelization of Mindanao
and Sulu. The Spanish Jesuits accepted
the commission, along with the attached condition that they would not try to
recover any of the property confiscated by the government from the Old
Society. On 4 February 1859, 6 priests
and 4 brothers under the leadership of Fr. Jose Fernandez Cuevas set sail from
Cadiz for Manila. They landed on 14
April, being received with great charity
by the Augustinians, who had them stay in their house at Guadalupe until they
could set up for themselves.
A grant from the government enabled them to purchase a house
at the corner of Anda and Arzobispo streets in the walled city, and this became
and remained the central residence of the Philippine Mission until it was
destroyed in the recapture of Manila by the American forces in 1945.
THE ESCUELA MUNICIPAL
Soon after the Jesuits’ arrival, the city council of Manila
put in a request that they take charge of the Escuela Municipal, a public
primary school for boys. Father Cuevas
at first refused on the plea that his orders were only to take charge of the
Mindanao missions; but Governor Norzagaray finally persuaded him to accept by
taking responsibility of explaining the step to the home government.
On 10 December 1859 Don Lorenzo Moreno Conde, the
schoolmaster then in charge of the Escuela Municipal, formally handed it over
to the new Jesuit faculty, consisting of Father Jose Ignacio Guerrico, prefect
of studies, Fathers Pascual Barado and Ramon Barua, teachers, and Brother
Venancio Belzunce, prefect of discipline.
They found that there were 33 boys registered but only 23 in actual
attendance. Nine days later they moved
the school to a building across Anda Street from the mission house; by that
time the enrollment had risen to 76. On
2 January 1860, it stood at 120 and the following March at 170. The school closed at the end of June and
reopened in August with an enrollment of 210.
The statutes drawn up by Father Cuevas and approved by the
governor (15 December 1859) provided for an elementary school of five grades,
namely, infima, inferior, media, superior
and suprema. The subjects taught in the first 3 grades were
Christian doctrine, good manners and right conduct, oral and written Spanish,
arithmetic, geography and history. The
last two grades were devoted to Spanish literature and composition, algebra,
geometry, trigonometry and elementary science, besides Christian doctrine, good
manners and right conduct. Boys in the
upper grades could take lessons in French, music and drawing at the option of
their parents. Latin, philosophy and the
higher sciences were to come later: the school was at first strictly a
“primary” school.
It should be noted that the Escuela Municipal was a public
school primarily for Spanish boys, since the city council which supported it
represented at that time the Spanish residents of Manila. However, the Jesuits from the very beginning
of their administration opened the school to Filipinos and boys of other
nationalities, so that by the end of the 19th century nine-tenths of
the student body were Filipinos or mestizos.
MINDANAO MISSIONS RESTORED
In 1860 Father Cuevas made an exploratory trip to Mindanao,
and two years later the first mission station of the restored Society in that
island was opened by Father Guerrico and two lay brothers at Tomantaka,
Cotabato Province. A second station was
founded the same year at Tetuan, Zamboanga Province, and a third at Isabela on the island of Basilan. All three were in
Moro territory. In 1868 work among the
pagan tribes was begun with the foundation of the mission in Davao. Since the Spanish government wanted the
Jesuits to have complete charge of Mindanao, the Recollects began turning over
to them the largely Christian towns on the north coast island, starting with
Dapitan in 1870.
The Moro commonwealths of southern Mindanao and Sulu had
lost much of their former prosperity and power.
They could no longer raid at will through the islands, for western
technology now enabled the Spanish government to oppose them with faster ships
and deadlier weapons. Father Guerrico at
Tomantaka observed that the Moros were quite willing to sell their young slaves
and even their children in times of scarcity.
With funds collected for the purpose, he and his successors ransomed a
number of these waifs. Their idea was to
organize a model Christian community in the heart of Moroland and thus convert
that people by living example rather than by words. While they were growing up, the boys lived,
studied and worked under the Jesuits in one compound of the “reduction”, the
girls in a separate compound under a community of the Religious of the Virgin
Mary. As soon as they came of age, the
young people were suitably matched and married.
Each couple was given a house and lot, a piece of farmland and tools.
Gradually, a peaceful and prosperous agricultural community, free from
recurrent famines and feuds that plagued the area, formed around the Tomantaka
mission. It attracted the admiration and
interest of influential Moros and might have led to greater things had not the
disturbances consequent upon the Revolution of 1896 intervened. After the establishment of American Rule, the
experiment was not resumed.
Neither the Jesuits of the Old Society nor the Recollects
who took their places after the expulsion did much to evangelize the pagan
tribes of the rugged east coast of Mindanao, the upper reaches of the Agusan
River, the Davao hinterland or the Bukidnon plateau. The Jesuits of the Restored Society did. Using essentially the same methods as those
by which their confreres had achieved the Christianization of Bohol, Leyte and
Samar two centuries earlier, they penetrated far into the interior of the island
and induced the semi-nomadic tribal peoples to settle down in stable farming
communities. Many towns and villages in
these areas still bear the names which these pioneer missionaries had given
them. In the intervals between
missionary journeys the father wrote detailed reports about their work to the superior
of the Philippine mission and to that of the Province of Aragon. Those of general interest were collected and
published at intervals between 1877 and 1895; and the resulting 10 volumes of Cartas de Filipinas constitute, even
today, an indispensable source not only for the historian of Christian
missions, but for the social and cultural anthropologist.
THE NORMAL SCHOOL
The Mindanao Jesuits reported to the provincial of Aragon
because it was to Aragon that the Philippine Mission was attached when the
Spanish Jesuits were divided into several provinces in 1863. That same year the royal government issued a
decree instituting public school system in the Philippines, and providing for
government support of a normal school for men under Jesuit direction. The preliminary studies which led to this
decree had been made some years previously in Manila by a committee in whose
deliberations Father Cuevas had been invited to take part. The decree incorporated many of his
suggestions; in particular, that the medium of instruction in the system should
be Spanish, a proposal which he advocated strenuously, in particular, in the
face of strong opposition. The
opposition came from a powerful segment of the Spanish community which opposed
the teaching of Spanish to the Filipinos on the ground that it would unite the
Filipinos against Spain, put them on an equality with Spaniards, and place in
their hands a potent weapon against the mother country. The fact that the Jesuits advocated giving to
Filipinos the same opportunities for education as Spaniads put them in the same
camp as Rizal and other Filipino patriots who will later agitate for the same
thing. And later, when the revolution
broke out, the Jesuits in Spanish eyes shared the blame with the Filipino
patriots for having caused it.
On 24 January 1865, the Escuela Normal de Maestros opened
with an enrollment of 69 in a rented building not far from the Escuela
Municipal. Father Francisco Baranera
was the first rector and Fathers Jacinto Juanmarti and Pedro Llausas the first
professors. In 1886, the school moved to
its own quarters in the Ermita district.
By 1901, when it ceased to be a government institution, it had conferred
to the title of maestro asistente on
340 graduates, that of maestro on
1,693 and that of maestro superior on
eight.
THE MANILA OBSERVATORY
The street running past the Escuela Normal was a one time
called Calle del Observatorio and
later Padre Faura Street. This was
appropriate, for the Escuela Normal property was shared by another Jesuit
institution, the Manila Observatory, of which Father Federico Faura was the
first director. The beginnings of the
Observatory go back to 1865, when two scholastics of the Escuela Municipal ,
Francisco Colina and Jaime Nonell, published in a local paper observations on a
typhoon which had recently passed near the city. The observations were taken by Colina with
some meteorological instruments which he had put together himself. They suggested the possibility that the
approach of a typhoon might be forecast in time to save lives and
property. The interest of the business
community of Manila was aroused and enough money was subscribed to purchase the
universal meteorograph, a continuously recording instrument designed by the
Italian Jesuit, Father Angelo Secchi.
When the metorograph arrived, it was assembled and operated
by another scholastic interested in scientific work, Federico Faura. After completing his theoloical studies,
Father Faura worked for a time in the Jesuit observatories at Stonyhurst and
Rome. He returned to the Philippines in
1878 as director of the Manila Observatory, a post which he held until his
death in 1897. In 1879 he issued his
first typhoon warning. These warnings
became a regular and valued service of the Observatory thereafter. To extend the scope and increase the accuracy
of the service, the Spanish government in 1884 made the Observatory a state
institution with a network of subsidiary stations throughout the archipelago. A seismic section was added to the
Observatory in 1880, a magnetic section in 1887, and an astronomical section in
1899.
