Indigenous Marriage in the Archdiocese of Manila (17th and 18th c.)

Missionaries and colonial authorities came to the Philippine Islands with their eyes wide open about indigenous marriage customs. Their ethnographic descriptions of this social institution were implicitly comparative, guided by the schema of canon law on marriage. An underlying question in the minds of religious authors was: To what extent were local practices and values and canonical marriage commensurable, with a view to Christianizing the former? The process of answering this question is illustrated by two centuries of experience in the archdiocese of Manila, which covered the Tagalog and Kapampangan provinces. From commensurability, the Catholic Church’s considerations broadened (or narrowed down) to compatibility, from which localization ensued.
This project examines the process of negotiation of matrimonial normativities mainly through the actors: on the one hand, indigenous litigants, their advocates, kinship groups and communities, and on the other, provisors, doctrineros, vicars forane, and moral theologians. Their pleas, arguments, and pronouncements articulate attempts to integrate knowledge of the different normativities affecting marriage. Upholding the principles and enforcing the requirements of church marriage meant dealing with geographical and mobility challenges as well as an entanglement of human passions, kinship dynamics, and socioeconomic hierarchies, often expressed in the language of honor, freedom, and tradition. Another area examined consists of communicative media and practices used to inculcate sacramental marriage and marital values, specifically ecclesiastical legislation, pragmatic literature, and popular, oral literature. Cutting across these areas is the question of public morality, that is, the varying degrees of identification with the norms of canonical marriage.