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The most contentious issue in the Revolutionary Congress that crafted the 1899 Malolos Constitution pertained to the separation of church and state, which won by a mere one vote. Until now this episode in Philippine history has not received a satisfactory explanation, which this article seeks to offer. The debate in Malolos, as argued here, was profoundly divisive because the two sides were driven by differing visions of national community. A crucial point was the Filipinization of the Catholic Church, which the proponents of church-state unity championed and which their opponents sidestepped. Even as the debate raged, however, Aguinaldo's revolutionary government acted on the church-state issue out of political expediency. In the end, the issue that Filipino elites could not resolve was settled by US colonialism, which imposed church-state separation without Filipinization.
Keywords: separation of church and state, Catholic Church, Filipino nationalism, Spanish friars, Masonry, Mabini, Aglipay
The Revolutionary Congress that convened on September 15, 1898-which Apolinario Mabini, who became Aguinaldo's chief adviser, originally conceived to be merely an advisory body-went on to write a constitution for the fledgling Republic of the Philippines whose independence was declared on June 12, 1898 (Agoncillo 1960, 294-295). In the Congress's debate over the new nation's charter, the most divisive, controversial, and "energetically debated" (Majul 1967, 153) issue pertained to the relations between church and state. Interestingly this assembly was meeting within the premises of the Barasoain Church in Malolos, Bulacan, which was momentarily desacralized and converted to a state legislative arena adorned with numerous Philippine flags.
In the 1960s Teodoro Agoncillo (1960) and Cesar Majul (1967) wrote about this aspect of the Malolos Congress as part of their larger projects on the Philippine revolution. Since then scholarship on this topic has stalled, with hardly any new work published in subsequent decades. This article builds on these early writings. However, as shown here, the analyses by Agoncillo and Majul of the question of church-state relations were inadequate, not necessarily in terms of historical sources-with Felipe G. Calderón's Mis Memorias Sobre la Revolución Filipina (My Memoirs of the Philippine Revolution, 1907) serving as the main source,1)-but in the interpretive frame with which they explained the divisiveness of this issue. Agoncillo (1960), for instance, reduced the Malolos Congress to, in...