From an Ilocano to Pope Leo XIV: Apologize for 600 years of Augustinian subjugation of Indigenous people

Augustinians ran what is now the Philippines as a unique theocracy in place of the Spanish monarchs. It involved forcing indigenous people together into a “Filipino people” named after their conquerer, King Philip II of Castile. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

I carry in my blood the anger of my Ilocano ancestors. I carry their grief, their humiliation, and their shattered spirits.

And I write now not with polite detachment but with the righteous rage of generations who were robbed—of names, of gods, of sovereignty, of language, of land.

And I direct that rage toward one of the most culpable architects of our cultural annihilation: the Augustinian Order of the Roman Catholic Church.

Let us be clear—the Augustinians were not passive evangelists who simply brought a new faith. They were brutal colonizers in cassocks, enforcers of a theocratic regime that stripped the Ilocano people of their identity with the smug conviction of divine right.

For 600 years, they have held moral and spiritual authority while refusing to name, let alone confess, the carnage they caused.

They were the ideological spearhead of Spain’s conquest—marching with the military, sanctifying violence, and crushing indigenous resistance beneath the cross and the crown.

My people, the Ilocano, were never given the chance to negotiate the terms of faith.

We were forced into Catholicism not by miracles or persuasion, but by muskets and garrotes.

Refuse baptism, and you’d be tortured.

Resist colonial power, and you’d be labeled a heretic, a pagan, a devil to be exorcised.

We were deemed unworthy unless we bled out everything that once made us whole.

Our spiritual practices—our anito, our rituals honoring the rain, the mountains, the ancestors—were banned, mocked, and replaced with Latin masses we did not understand and Spanish saints we did not revere.

We were not assimilated.

We were pulverized.

And in that pulverization, the Augustinians found glory.

They built massive cathedrals on lands they stole.

They renamed villages and rivers, silencing our oral traditions.

They imposed Spanish surnames on Ilocano families through the Catálogo Alfabético de Apellidos, fracturing our genealogies and erasing our ancestral memory.

They broke us into submission and then declared it holy.

Now, Pope Leo XIV, a member and spiritual descendant of that very order, presides over a Church that still does not acknowledge this reign of terror.

He is not only the Bishop of Rome—he is a product of an institution that wove itself into the bones of the Philippines and crushed the Ilocano identity beneath layers of Latin, Spanish, and Vatican decree.

When he smiles and speaks of unity, I sometimes see not a shepherd but a successor of the wolves that hunted my people into silence.

This is not ancient history.

The trauma of Augustinian colonization lives in our fragmented names, our hybridized faith, our forgotten rituals, our brown skin kneeling to foreign saints while we whisper our grandparents’ stories in shame.

And to this day, no apology has come.

No recognition.

No reckoning.

The Church speaks of reconciliation, yet offers none.

It calls for peace, yet buries the truth.

And so I carry this rage because if we do not name our wound, it will never heal.

I am Ilocano.

I descend from warriors, farmers, seers, and storytellers who resisted.

And while the Augustinians erased their names from the records, they did not erase them from me.

Let the Church know: We doremember. And we demand that they remember too.

Pope Leo now has an opportunity to formally apologize for those historic, bloody life-taking wrongs.