The Role of the Junta Teológica in Shaping Spanish Colonial Policy in the 16th-Century Philippines

The particular circumstances of the invasion and conquest of the Philippines by the Spanish in the late sixteenth-century gave rise to a unique institution that profoundly shaped the local development of colonial policy: the junta teológica. Sarcastically given this name by a frustrated governor in 1592 to chastise what he considered the overreach of ambitious ecclesiastics into secular matters, the name stuck and the institution thrived throughout the colonial period. It was a unique institution within the Spanish empire and highly influential at the local level. This paper will examine how the junta teológica developed, accrued power, and shaped the Spanish colonial administration and its policies in the sixteenth-century Philippines. It will demonstrate how experiences and discourses from conquests that had taken place in the Americas a generation previously powerfully shaped the scope of colonial ambition but how the development of colonial institutions ultimately responded before all else to the local circumstances settlers and officials confronted in the archipelago and had to face with few resources and little interest from a distant crown.