Philippines: A Pillar of Missionary Success

I would like to give every Filipino a personal congratulatory handshake: their country is the most successfully brainwashed in the world.

Not in a dangerous sense, just in a twistedly amusing one.

I thought I must have met a real nut when a local described the starting point of history in the Philippines as “the Spanish discovered us in the 16th century.” What are you, a planet? A new species of plant? What do you mean you were ‘discovered?’ But it turns out that for many Filipinos, this was the start of their existence. Probably because before that, there was no Christianity in the Philippines.

I don’t think it would be a stretch to call the Philippines the most Christian country in the world, especially keeping in mind that it was more or less forced into Catholicism by Magellan and his successors. Officially it’s 92% Christian (81% Catholic), 5 of the remaining % being radical Muslims living in the southern islands near Indonesia, which are really more like bastions of crazy than part of a country.

Walking through a shopping mall in Tagbilaran, the capital of Bohol Island, I was perusing the somehow legal stores of copied games and movies, when over the PA for the entire mall comes a generic pop beat that I took to be a bland shopping tune. Then a voice dubbed over the beat starts, “Hail Mary, full of grace…” I look around me and everyone, the customers, the clerks, and even the security guards stopped in mid-transaction to bow their head as everyone in the mall repeated the prayer, crossed their hearts, and proceeded walking like nothing had ever happened. I could have run out with all the merchandise in the store and no one would have been the wiser. Not to mention the people around me were praying whilst surrounded by thousands of copies of copyrighted material. Never seen anything like it.

Though most of their Empire has long since crumbled, the Spanish Conquistadors and missionaries can rest in their graves knowing that their efforts were not unfruitful.