ABSTRACT
It is difficult to overstate the importance of Catholicism in the Philippines. Catholicism plays an integral role not only as a set of beliefs but in everyday cultural, social and political life. The Spanish era bequeathed to the colony-nation a very mixed legacy: an excessively powerful Church along with a symbolic universe from which both elites and lower class Filipinos drew for their visions of the possible and the desirable. American-era colonial nation-building reframed the space in which popular Catholicism and the Catholic Church functioned. Catholic ideals of family with the mother at its center were integral to the social and cultural norms of the twentieth century but also proved capable of accommodating the expanding educational paths open to upper- and middle-class women. The Church leadership of the 1950s to the 1970s went to great lengths to prevent the success of more radical socialist and communist movements from coming to power and survived internal divisions to claim its place in the democratic nation of the 1990s and 2000s. But Filipino Catholics continue to find meaning and appeal in fundamentalist movements as well as Catholic evangelical movements. The country is at a historical juncture with the possibilities of ongoing and ever more wide-ranging changes that may come about if people are given the chance to actively plan their family size.
