ABSTRACT
John Leddy Phelan has extensively sifted through missionary records to uncover the process of Hispanization and Christianization of the Filipino population in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The number of baptisms rose proportionately to the increase in missionary personnel, as the following approximate figures suggest: Thus it took some fifty years of intensive missionary activity to lay the foundation of Philippine Christianity. This chapter illustrates the degree to which functional Hispanization had progressed within fifty years of the conquest. These Filipinos were sufficiently Hispanized to attempt to continue inside the framework of canon law the pre-conquest tradition of easy divorce. The most certain and direct means of winning grace is through the sacrament of penance. Because of the situation described above, this easier route was closed to most Filipinos.
