Filipino Catholicism and Black Nazarene Quiapo
Majority of Filipinos in living in the Philippines are Catholic. Catholicism came from more than 300 hundred years of Spanish rule in the country. The Spaniards converted the Filipinos to Catholicism in order to easily pacify them. But even if they were able to convert the Filipinos, Catholicism put on a different quality when it reached the Philippine shores.
Just take a look at the celebration of Black Nazarene in Quipo, Church. You will not see any celebration like that in Spain or even in Mexico which was also a colony of the Spanish. During the Black Nazarene celebration, the statue of Jesus carrying the cross is paraded around the district of Quiapo, Manila. Filipino devotees that reach up to 3 million participate in this event.
The devotees endure the heat of the sun, the crowded streets and the hours of barefoot walking as an external manifestation of their faith. The statue came from a Spanish friar but the devotion cannot come anywhere else but from Filipino pre-colonial culture.
Before the Spaniards came, Filipinos show their devotion to their gods by worshiping anitos. Anitos are wooden carvings of the Philippine gods. They touch the anitos because they believe that the spirit of the gods go into the wooden carvings. This belief is manifested in the present-day devotion to the Black Nazarene at Quiapo Church. The Spanish have converted the Filipinos to Catholicism but even so, Filipinos maintain their pre-colonial culture and assimilated it over to a kind of Catholicism we can only call as Filipino Catholicism.