On the Feast of St. Thomas Aquinas, 28 January 1995, faculty members of Ateneo de Manila University gathered to present papers on the topic "Recovering Medieval Legacies in the Philippines." This symposium, organized by the Department of History, sought to explore the manifold ways in which the European Middle Ages have been influential for the history of this country. The eager initial response of many of the participants to a proposed symposium suggested the richness of the entire subject. It was clear that the entire field of Philippine church history would be incomprehensible without understanding the formation of political, sacramental, and devotional traditions of Roman Catholicism during the Middle Ages. This paper is one of the papers from that symposium.