Unlike in Spanish rule when the sole religion was Roman Catholicism, under the US occupation, following the arrival of an American pastor in 1903, paved the way for a denominational difference between the Jesuits, who administered the Davao region, and the Protestants.
In the Jesuit chronicles, the contentious conflict seemed to escalate in the second decade of American rule when Protestant conversions in areas tended by the priests became intense. Even in Davao town, the province’s administrative hub, the tension was palpable so much so that in one account the Protestant sect was labeled as “very perverse and active in its procedures.”
During the Spanish regime, the priests, chiefly Spaniards, did not have any rivals to contend with. The government’s running feud with the Moros had nothing to do with religion but more about territory. This was not the case during the US rule when some institutions, like the Davao Mission Hospital, were owned and managed by the Protestant missionaries.
Although the American administration, in respect of the US Constitution, promoted the bill of rights in the district, the freedom of religion at times created conflict when the priests, in the exercise of their pastoral duties, visited the hospital, puericulture center, or infirmary, and administer the sacraments exclusive to the Catholic faith.
In a 1911 incident, Fr. Juan Rebull, the Jesuit parish priest of San Pedro Church, had discord with the American pastor, a member of the Congregationalists assigned to preach Protestantism in Mindanao, concerning the burial of a man who died after receiving all the Catholic sacraments. The minister wanted the dead interred as a Protestant but the cleric opposed it.
To resolve the dispute, Fr. Rebull filed an urgent written complaint before the justice of the peace but both parties were not satisfied with the ruling because the judge was indecisive.
In the end, according to a report in the Cartas Edificantes de la Provincia de Aragon, “the corpse was buried at the expense of the municipality of Davao, without no religious pomp, neither Catholic nor Protestant, more clearly, like a dog.”
Even inside the church, during sacramental rites, the undercurrents between the two Christian faiths were palpable. A 1916 Jesuit account says a lot about the sectarian disharmony:
‘The rector, accompanied by a commission of the three intern brigades with cardinal habits, left the sacristy to administer the Holy Sacrament. The boy who was not more than ten years old, blond as an angel and dressed in a white suit, accompanied by his godparents, advanced towards the altar and kneeling before the Miraculous Virgin, with a firm and vibrant voice read the solemn abjuration of the errors of the Protestant sect. After he finished his recitation, the rector poured on the head of the blessed child the regenerating water of baptism.’
Perhaps the more telling issue that divides the two sects is Freemasonry. Vatican, even today, views the practices of the fraternal craft as contrary to the teachings of Catholicism. This was felt in Davao region over a century ago when the Freemasons, chiefly Protestants in the US military, needed a graveyard for themselves and their deceased loved ones.
To address the void, David Jacobson, a Jewish American serviceman who had properties in Davao City and owned a plantation in Pantukan, Davao de Oro, donated part of his assets to become what is now a Masonic cemetery in Wireless, Davao City.
Discord between the two sects, however, did not escalate into sectarian conflict. The elders of the Protestant churches, like the Roman Catholic clergy, have found a common and engaging ground to agree on because both sects and their breakaway factions preach the same gospels and pray to the same Almighty God.
