The Philippines is a mainly Christian country. About 79 per cent of Filipinos are Roman Catholic, according to the 2020 census, giving it the largest Catholic population in Asia and the third-largest in the world after Brazil and Mexico. Islam is the largest minority, about 6 per cent, concentrated in Mindanao and the Sulu archipelago. The rest belong mostly to other Christian churches, including the home-grown Iglesia ni Cristo (about 2.6 per cent), evangelical groups and the Philippine Independent Church. Along with Timor-Leste, it is one of only two predominantly Christian countries in South-East Asia.
A Cross in Cebu, 1521
Christianity arrived with Ferdinand Magellan's expedition, which reached the central Philippines in March 1521. On the island of Cebu, the local ruler Rajah Humabon and hundreds of his people were baptised, and Magellan presented Humabon's wife with a small statue of the child Jesus, the Santo Niño. Magellan was killed weeks later at Mactan by the chief Lapulapu. When the Spanish returned under Miguel López de Legazpi in 1565, a soldier found the same Santo Niño in a burned house in Cebu. It is kept today in the Basílica Menor del Santo Niño and is the oldest Christian relic in the country. Beside the basilica, a small chapel houses Magellan's Cross, encased in wood, which tradition says holds fragments of the cross planted in 1521.
Spain founded Manila in 1571 and ruled the islands for 333 years. Religious orders, the Augustinians, Franciscans, Jesuits, Dominicans and Recollects, carried out most of the conversion and ran the parishes, schools and much of the land. Four of the stone churches they built, including San Agustín in Manila and the fortress-like church at Miagao, are listed together as the Baroque Churches of the Philippines World Heritage Site. The friars' power also fuelled the nationalist revolt of the 1890s, and the Philippine Revolution against Spain was aimed as much at the friars as at the colonial government.
Islam Came First
Islam reached the southern islands about 150 years before Christianity. Tradition credits an Arab missionary, Karim ul-Makhdum, with building the first mosque in the Philippines, on the island of Simunul in Tawi-Tawi, in about 1380. The mosque's original pillars still stand inside a newer building. By the fifteenth century the Sultanate of Sulu had been founded, followed by the Sultanate of Maguindanao on Mindanao, and Islam had spread along the trade routes to Manila, which had Muslim rulers when the Spanish arrived.
Spain never fully conquered the Muslim south, whose people it called Moros, after the Moors of Spain. Resistance continued under American rule and after independence, and a separatist insurgency from the 1970s cost more than 100,000 lives by many estimates. A 2014 peace agreement led to the creation in 2019 of the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao, with its own parliament. In 2024 the Supreme Court ruled that Sulu, which had voted against joining, was not part of the region. The south also saw the Philippines' worst recent violence: in 2017, fighters allied to the Islamic State seized the city of Marawi, and a five-month battle left much of it destroyed.
Churches Born in the Philippines
Two large churches founded in the Philippines show how Filipino Christianity has developed its own forms. The Philippine Independent Church, or Aglipayan Church, broke away from Rome in 1902 under the priest Gregorio Aglipay as a nationalist Catholic church with Filipino bishops. The Iglesia ni Cristo, founded by Felix Manalo in 1914, rejects the Trinity and is known for its tightly organised congregations, its distinctive steepled chapels and the practice of voting as a bloc in elections, which makes its endorsement sought after by candidates. In 2014 it opened the Philippine Arena north of Manila, with about 55,000 seats, the largest indoor arena in the world.
American rule after 1898 brought Protestant missions and the separation of church and state. Evangelical and Pentecostal churches, including large movements such as El Shaddai and Jesus Is Lord, have grown rapidly since the 1980s, often among Filipinos who remain nominally Catholic.
Faith in the Streets
Filipino Catholicism is public and physical. Each 9 January, the Traslación carries the Black Nazarene, a dark wooden statue of Christ brought from Mexico in 1606, through the streets of Quiapo in Manila. Barefoot devotees surge towards the carriage to touch the statue or throw towels to be wiped on it. The procession can last more than twenty hours, and organisers estimate the crowds in the millions.
The Santo Niño is honoured with festivals across the Visayas each January, among them the Sinulog in Cebu, the Ati-Atihan in Kalibo and the Dinagyang in Iloilo. In the nine days before Christmas, millions attend Simbang Gabi, a series of Masses held before dawn from 16 to 24 December. Christmas decorations famously go up in September, at the start of the "ber months". On Maundy Thursday many families make the Visita Iglesia, praying in seven churches in one night. In May, towns hold the Flores de Mayo, ending in the Santacruzan procession honouring the finding of the True Cross, and on All Saints' Day, 1 November, families spend the day and often the night in cemeteries with their dead, a holiday called Undas. During Holy Week, some penitents in Pampanga province flagellate themselves, and a few are nailed to crosses in the village of San Pedro Cutud, a practice the Church discourages but has not stopped.
Religion Across the Islands
Faith is not spread evenly across the country's three island groups. Luzon, in the north, is the Catholic heartland, but its north-western Ilocos region is also the stronghold of the Aglipayan Church, whose founder came from the Ilocano town of Batac. The Visayas, in the centre, are the most intensely devotional region, organised around the Santo Niño and the great January festivals. Mindanao, in the south, is the most mixed. Although it is often thought of as Muslim, large-scale settlement by Christian families from Luzon and the Visayas during the twentieth century, much of it government-sponsored, made Christians the majority on the island as a whole. Muslims now make up around a quarter of Mindanao's population, concentrated in the west and in the island chains running towards Borneo, while Indigenous Lumad peoples live in the uplands.
Schools, Universities and Parishes
The Church's reach runs through education. The University of Santo Tomas in Manila, founded by the Dominicans in 1611, is the oldest existing university in Asia. The Jesuit Ateneo de Manila and the De La Salle schools educate much of the country's political and business elite. Catholic schools, hospitals and charities across the country are often the most visible institutions outside the capital, and the parish priest remains an influential local figure in many rural towns.
A Church That Travels
Around ten million Filipinos live or work abroad, and they have changed Catholic life far beyond the Philippines. On Sundays in Hong Kong, Singapore and the Gulf states, Filipino workers fill churches, and in countries with ageing congregations, such as Italy and Ireland, Filipino migrants and priests have revived parishes. At home, the Church runs ministries for the families of overseas workers, who are separated for years at a time. The Philippines increasingly sends priests abroad rather than receiving them. Cardinal Luis Antonio Tagle, a former archbishop of Manila, became one of the most senior figures in the Vatican.
The Church and the State
The Catholic Church has played a large part in Philippine politics. In February 1986, Cardinal Jaime Sin used the Church-run Radio Veritas to call people onto Manila's EDSA avenue to protect military defectors. The crowds, with nuns kneeling in front of tanks, helped bring down President Ferdinand Marcos in the People Power Revolution. Popes have drawn some of the largest crowds in history here. Pope John Paul II's Mass at World Youth Day in 1995 and Pope Francis's Mass in Manila in January 2015 were each estimated at several million people.
The Church's influence shows in the law. The Philippines is the only country in the world, apart from Vatican City, where most citizens cannot obtain a divorce. Annulments are possible but slow and expensive, and only Muslims, under a separate 1977 code of personal law, can divorce. Bills to legalise divorce have repeatedly passed the House of Representatives, most recently in 2024, but have not passed the Senate. The Church lost a long battle over contraception, however, when Congress passed the Reproductive Health Act in 2012.
Older Beliefs Beneath the Surface
Before Islam and Christianity, Filipinos honoured spirits called anito and ancestors, with rituals led by women or cross-dressing male priests known as babaylan. Those traditions survive among Indigenous peoples of the Cordillera, such as the Ifugao, whose rice terraces are a World Heritage Site, and among the Lumad peoples of Mindanao. They also survive in popular Catholicism, in beliefs about spirits such as the diwata, in healing traditions, and in the offerings some families still leave for ancestors. The Philippines' place among the world's great Catholic countries is compared in our overview of religion in Mexico, and its Muslim south connects to the Malay world described in religion in Indonesia.