The pundits have spoken. The Pinoy traditional political landscape has been completely refashioned. And who refashioned it? The mass of the electorate! The lettered elite is aghast and caught unawares but they shouldn’t be, only if they seriously read the history of the Philippine Revolution. The 1896 Katipunan revolution was a truly mass movement, consisting of the working class, pesantry, middle and professional classes and the landed and lettered elites. The participation of the pesantry and the working classes were not due to propaganda alone. Neither were they deceived by their folk Catholicism. They saw meaning in these expressions which saw in their definition of nationhood. For without these the revolution would have not been a force and immediately would have been crushed. The historian Rey Ileto notes that the folk Catholic “Pasyon” is the wellspring of Filipino ideologies of revolution. The meanings the peasants found in the Passion of Christ has counterparts
"It is surely harmful to souls to make it a heresy to believe what is proved" - Galileo