Freemasonry in Spain was known to flourish centuries after the Crusades. Its arrival in the islands dates only to the time when Spanish military officers and administrators started overseeing the affairs of the islands as a colony.
In Davao region, Masons practiced the craft privately, aware of the anti-Masonic posture of the Church. Although the clergy stood by the Catholic teachings, they did not confront directly the supposed evils associated with the fraternity. Some church leaders did not even find conflict with the craft if conversions were not done in public. In fact, several soldiers assigned as military-police commandants in the district were members of Masonic lodges in Spain.
Masonic doings in Mati started in 1892 or 1893, giving rise to a cluster of three Masons forming a bloc or triangulo known as Diwata Lodge No. 65, the oldest in Davao, with Pedro Serrano Laktaw as worshipful master. This makes Mati the seat of Freemasonry in the region.
This initiative finds support in a 1920 account citing the plan to expand Masonic activities throughout the islands but failed to generate public interest given the strong Church influence. Of the total number of fraternities created until 1893, thirty-five were Masonic lodges, nine in Manila. In July of that year, the craft started accepting women as members of appendant bodies.
Missionary chronicles provide sketchy details of Masonry in the region. In a letter dated November 7, 1898, from Sigaboy, Fr. Manuel Rosello, S.J., invoking God’s blessing and guidance for the converts, sought protection for the priests to be freed “from the claws of the common enemy, Masonry, the filibustering, as well as the Yankee hordes,” referring to the American colonizers.
Fr. Rosello cited in his letter an incident when a gang of “robbers and revolutionaries… had wanted to imitate the Tagalogs [who revolted in Luzon] and destroyed the peace all over the district [Davao] but especially in Mati where the government office used to be,” adding that “in Mati everything became a race… trenches… barricades and panic, fears that the rebels would appear from either side.” He was referring to the September 23, 1898, uprising in Baganga led by Don Prudencio Garcia, a Mason and a captain in the guardia civil. The dissent was an offshoot of the supposed corruption committed by the governor of Davao but not a rebellion against Spain.
As extensions of the Spanish government, Col. Manuel Garcia y Neilla, then chief of the Mati police, and Don Ricardo Rodriguez, commandant of Mati, coordinated to arrest the infantryman but had to yield to the mediation of Fr. Mateo Gisbert, S.J., then parish priest of Baganga. As an aftermath, Garcia peacefully surrendered and allowed himself to be brought to Mati.
Despite the bad reviews the missionaries had about the Masonic activities in the Davao region, Don Prudencio’s rapport with the Church and colonial officials was a bright note in his link with the priests. In fact, while in Mati, upon learning that the Gonzales family of Surigao had rounded up the Jesuits after the Spanish forces were beaten in the mock Battle of Manila Bay, he dispatched a team of 25 men to Surigao to seize power on March 24, 1899, and free the missioners.
A month later, on April 23, the colonel ordered the arrest of Juan Gonzales and his two sons, Simon and Wenceslao, a Mason and Katipunan member. The Gonzaleses, while escorted to Baganga on a boat, were shot and killed at Kabawan, Cortes, Surigao del Norte. As the Philippine revolution spread to Visayas and Mindanao, Gen. Emilio Aguinaldo, himself a Mason, installed Garcia as commander of the 3rd and 4th districts of Mindanao with the rank of brigadier general. To Gen. Aguinaldo’s dismay, he sided with the Americans ostensibly to save lives.
In a letter dated January 17, 1895, to the Jesuit superior general in Rome, Fr. Juan Ricart, once assigned in Davao, reported that peace and order conditions in the countryside had worsened, blaming colonial officials for the spread of “subversive activities” due to “the masonic lodges.”
