American Imperialism and the Roman Catholic Church in the Philippines

This dissertation argues that the Roman Catholic Church enabled the rise and expansion of US overseas empire in the Philippines in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. It asserts that US colonialism in the Philippines was the catalyst for rapprochement between the Holy See and the United States. Conventional histories of the US and the Philippines unanimously consider the advent of American rule in the Philippines as the period when the Catholic Church ceased to be a major force in colonial administration, following the dissolution of Spanish Patronato Real or Patronato Regio, the formal system of church-state union in which the state provided temporal support to the church in exchange for the privilege of shaping ecclesiastical policy. However, using the concept of secularism to mean the power of the state to shape the contours of religion, I demonstrate how the American empire, like its Spanish predecessor, forged a working and close relationship with the institutional church which ultimately facilitated its exercise of sovereign control of the islands. By focussing on how the American regime heavily influenced the creation of internal church policy, the reconstitution of the Catholic hierarchy in the archipelago, the sale of the friar estates, and the way the profits from said sale were to be disposed, this dissertation ultimately demonstrates that what the United States created in the Philippines was a Catholic empire.

Name dc:type.qualificationname

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Level dc:type.qualificationlevel

Doctoral

Grantor dc:publisher.institution

University of Cambridge

Year dc:date.issued

2025

Author dc:creator

• Calacday, Jethro Andrew Eli

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Preston, Andrew

• Roman Catholic Church
• Catholicism
• US Empire
• US in the World
• Philippines
• Southeast Asia
• Papacy
• Papal diplomacy
• Holy See
• empire
• secularism
• religion
• church and state

Licence

• https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/bitstreams/8783ca81-defa-4f6b-8ee1-7a087eab7864/download
• https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Language dc:language

eng

Author Identifier

0000-0002-8440-4146

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:www.repository.cam.ac.uk:1810/390761