After Saint Justina in Oxford, I seem to have acquired a taste for female religious history. This time, for a conference organised in Singapore, I am following the Franciscan Apostolic Sisters in the Philippines: from an Italian missionary project to a Filipino congregation that eventually began sending missionaries back West.
The mission, in other words, reversed itself. I am still trying to head the other way.
Back home, or
into the footnotes?
The Event
- Conference
- Franciscan Spiritual Traditions & Asian Societies
- Hosted by
- * National University of Singapore;
* ISAC; - Where & when
- Singapore (online) — 30 September - 2 October, 2026
- Official Links
- * Conference
* National University of Singapore * Initiative for the Study of Asian Catholics
* GL Louis Religious Pluralism Research Cluster
Research summary - The Mission Reversed: Minoritas and the Franciscan Apostolic Sisters in the Philippines (1953–2003)
How does a community founded to support European missionaries become a missionary force in its own right? The Franciscan Apostolic Sisters (FAS) began in 1953 in Sta. Ana, Cagayan, through the initiative of Italian Franciscan missionary Gerardo Z. Filippetto. Yet the central story belongs to the Filipino women who gradually made the institution their own. Their experience gives minoritas – the Franciscan ideal of humility and a commitment to being among the ‘lesser’ – a concrete social and historical meaning. The sisters worked from two margins: a rural frontier described as lacking priests, and a female religious community initially intended to assist male missionaries. From this position, they built an autonomous congregation, gaining diocesan approval in 1964, formal recognition as a congregation under diocesan authority in 1996, and recognition under papal authority in 2003.
The direction of mission also changed. From 1992, Filipino sisters travelled as missionaries to dioceses in the United States. Women once on the receiving end of an Italian missionary initiative became agents of a ‘reverse mission’ to the West. Their history reveals a wider transformation in global Catholicism: Asian Catholic communities actively remake the institutions they receive. For rural women in the Cagayan Valley, the congregation also opened paths to education, religious formation, professional work in schools and healthcare, and leadership otherwise difficult to attain. These opportunities remained intertwined with obedience and expectations of women’s service. Empowerment and discipline together shaped female religious life in postcolonial Asia.
Institutional and diocesan records, read alongside the congregation’s accounts of its own history, reveal how this autonomy was built and justified. Stories that celebrate the founder are more than records of the past: they form an ‘architecture of memory,’ giving the sisters a shared account of their origins through which they legitimise their independence. The FAS story connects women’s capacity to act from the margins with religious networks across borders, while showing how Franciscan ideals take on new meanings within Asian societies.