The Rt. Rev. Nestor Poltic, Bishop of North Central Philippines, was elected the eighth prime bishop and primate Episcopal Church in the Philippines by the church’s triennial synod on May 14. He will succeed the Most Rev. Brent Harry Alawas, who has led the province of seven dioceses and about 125,000 members since 2021.
Poltic has served as the leader of Episcopalians in Northeastern and Central Luzon, the largest and most populated island of the Philippine archipelago, since 2018. He will continue as diocesan bishop while assuming leadership of the province.
The Anglican Communion’s Secretary General, Bishop Anthony Poggo, was present for the synod, which was held at the Cathedral of St. Mary and St. John in Quezon City. Poggo congratulated Poltic on his new role, while thanking Alawas for his faithful leadership.
“I pray for Bishop Nestor as he prepares for this next phase of his ministry and Bishop Brent as he assists in this transition. May the Anglican/Episcopal churches and communities of the Philippines know God’s blessings,” he said.
In his address to the synod, Alawas celebrated the church’s significant growth since the pandemic, noting that 34 new churches have been constructed since 2021, and that a missionary diocese was being launched in the Visayas, an archipelago in the central part of the nation. Enrollment at the church’s St. Andrew’s Seminary, he added, has topped 100 for the first time in many years, which will help to relieve a clergy shortage.
The Episcopal Church in the Philippines is a relatively small denomination in the heavily Catholic country. According to 2020 statistics, 89.8 percent of the residents of the former Spanish colony are Christians, and 88 percent of these are Roman Catholics. Only about 0.1 percent of Filipinos are members of the Episcopal Church, but it has, like other Protestant churches, enjoyed growth in recent decades.
The Episcopal Church in the Philippines has long enjoyed a close relationship (including full communion since 1960) with the country’s third-largest denomination, the Philippine Independent Church, often called the Aglipayan Church. This independent Catholic Church was founded in the late 19th century by Filipino nationalist leader Gregorio Aglipay, a former Roman Catholic priest.
The Philippine Episcopal Church has been an autonomous province since 1990, when it separated from the Episcopal Church. The Episcopal Church began mission work there in 1898, when the Philippines was occupied by U.S. forces after their victory over Spain in the Spanish-American War.
When the U.S. government formally opened the territory to Protestant missionaries, it assigned territories to different denominations (as reservations had been assigned earlier in the United States). The Episcopal Church, at the direction of its first missionary bishop, the Rt. Rev. Charles Henry Brent, refused to participate in the scheme, vowing to set “no altar over against another altar and no planting of churches over against another church.”
Episcopal mission instead focused on expatriates and foreign residents (especially Chinese) in Manila, and on remote indigenous groups, which had been relatively unreached by Roman Catholic missionaries during the region’s three and half centuries as a Spanish colony. Because of significant region-based social inequality, it took much longer for the church to develop an indigenous leadership, and its clergy were largely white Americans for many decades.
Several of the institutions that Brent helped found remain important national institutions. These are mostly clustered in Quezon City, a planned city in the greater Manila region, which was intended by its founders in the 1920s as a replacement for the crowded capital.
Trinity University, an Episcopal-affiliated college, St. Andrew’s Seminary (which trains ministers for both the Episcopal Church and the Philippine Independent Church), and St. Luke’s Medical Center cluster around the Cathedral of St. Mary and St. John in the section of the city known as Cathedral Heights.
The Episcopal Church in the Philippines has not been involved in the Anglican realignment, and participates actively in the Canterbury-based Instruments of Communion. Like most East Asian Anglican churches, it ordains women to the priesthood, but maintains traditional teaching and practice on human sexuality.
