Gregorio Aglipay

Gregorio Aglipay Cruz y Labayan was born on 8 May 1860 in Batac, Ilocos Norte, in the Philippines under Spanish colonial rule. Orphaned at a young age after the deaths of his parents, Pedro Aglipay Cruz and Victoriana Labayan, he grew up in modest circumstances and worked as a laborer in the tobacco fields of northern Luzon. He later obtained a formal education in Manila, studying at the Colegio de San Juan de Letran and at the University of Santo Tomas, before entering seminary. He was ordained a Roman Catholic priest in 1889 and served in parishes in Luzon as a member of the secular clergy rather than of a religious order.

During the Philippine Revolution against Spain in the late 1890s, Aglipay sided with the Filipino nationalist movement. In 1898 the revolutionary government headed by Emilio Aguinaldo appointed him Military Vicar General, making him the principal ecclesiastical official of the short-lived First Philippine Republic and the first Filipino to hold a post that Spanish friars and bishops had previously monopolized. He encouraged Filipino clergy to support independence and to assert control over local church administration. These actions, together with his break from the Spanish hierarchy, led the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Manila to excommunicate him in 1899. After the United States replaced Spain as colonial power, Aglipay continued to argue that the Philippine church should be led by Filipinos and independent of Rome.

In 1902 the journalist, labor organizer, and nationalist Isabelo de los Reyes proclaimed the Iglesia Filipina Independiente (Philippine Independent Church) in Manila and named Aglipay its first Obispo Máximo, or Supreme Bishop. Aglipay accepted the office in 1903. The new national church, popularly called the Aglipayan Church, attracted large numbers of Filipinos who resented Spanish clerical dominance and who wanted Catholic-style worship under Filipino leadership. At its height in the early twentieth century it claimed a substantial share of the population. Aglipay traveled abroad, including to the United States and Japan, and in later years was influenced by Unitarian theology, which shaped the church’s doctrine during his lifetime. He was not a patriarch of an Orthodox, Oriental Orthodox, Coptic, or Church of the East see, nor a pope; his title remained that of supreme bishop of an independent Catholic-derived national church.

Aglipay remained a public figure under American colonial rule and the Philippine Commonwealth. In 1935 he ran for President of the Philippines as the candidate of the Republican Party and was defeated by Manuel L. Quezon. In 1939 he married Pilar Jamias y Ver, a schoolteacher from Ilocos Norte, thereby departing from the celibacy required of Roman Catholic priests. He had no children. He died in Manila on 1 September 1940. The Philippine Independent Church survived him; in later decades, after a doctrinal reorientation away from the Unitarian tendencies of his final years, it entered full communion with the Anglican Communion while remaining a distinct Filipino church. Aglipay is remembered as a central figure in Filipino religious nationalism and in the creation of indigenous ecclesiastical institutions after centuries of Spanish colonial Catholicism. He has not been beatified or canonized by the Roman Catholic Church, and he is not associated with a universally recognized feast day or list of patronages in the Catholic sense.