13. The Poetics of Praise and the Demands of Confession in the Early Spanish Philippines

Abstract

This chapter combines two very different but intimately related texts. On the one hand, it reproduces three dalits, devotional poems by Tagalog natives praising the work of Catholic missionaries. On the other, it provides a questionnaire from an eighteenth-century confessional manual used by missionaries to administer the sacrament of Penance. Vicente L. Rafael argues that each text embodies a different attitude toward the written word in the religious life of the colonial Philippines. For the Tagalog authors of the dalits, the book becomes a magical talisman of sorts. For the missionaries, it provides the tactics of an intimate disciplinary strategy meant to alter the behavior of Filipino natives.