American Empire and Ecclesiastical Property: The Friar Lands Purchase and the Fondo Filippine, 1903–1940
Key information
- Date
- Time
-
6:00 pm to 7:30 pm
- Venue
- SOAS Gallery
- Room
- B103
- Event type
- Seminar
About this event
The Friar Lands Purchase of 1903 is one of the most notable facets of church-state relations in the Philippines under American rule (1898–1946), and yet its implications for US empire have not been fully parsed nor correctly understood.
The American colonial state, seeing the widespread hostility of Filipinos against the Spanish friars, recommended the expropriation of some 450,000 acres of agricultural estates (or haciendas) that the Dominicans, Augustinians, and Augustinian Recollects owned. The main objective was evidently political: to eliminate the grip of the Spanish friars in Philippine life. This presentation reinterprets this singular event in view of American imperialism, presenting it not as an innocuous business transaction but as a manifestation of state power over religion through control of church property and finances. Using archival data from the Vatican, the US, and Spain, I show how the purchase took place, notwithstanding stiff resistance from the Spanish friars, through the united efforts of the Holy See and the US government. I likewise present the result and aftermath of the purchase, namely the creation and eventual disappearance of what was known in the Vatican as the Fondo Filippine—the Philippine Fund. This fund was created by the Vatican at the instigation of the US government to support the Catholic Church in the Philippines now without state subsidy following the dissolution of the Spanish Patronato Real. Contrary to current scholarly consensus, this presentation demonstrates how US empire operated not only through legal and financial but also ecclesiastical channels.
Contact
- Organiser: Philippine Studies at SOAS
- Contact: philippinestudies@soas.ac.uk
Header image credit: '10000 Miles From Tip to Tip' by Unknown [illegible: Philadelphia Press]
About the speaker
Jethro A. E. A. Calacday recently completed his PhD in history, Trinity College, Cambridge. He is a Postdoctoral Affiliate at the Faculty of History, University of Cambridge and concurrently a Global Fellow at the Ansari Institute for Global Engagement with Religion, University of Notre Dame. He is currently at work on his first monograph-in-progress provisionally titled Catholic Empire: The American Colonial State and the Roman Catholic Church in the Transimperial Philippines, which is based on his Cambridge PhD, for which he was awarded the Marilyn Blatt Young Fellowship in 2024 by the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR).
