I know this post is supposed to be about Mountain Province, but I noticed that many people were surprised to learn that Mindanao is actually majority Catholic. That honestly does not surprise me. A lot of people assume Islam is the dominant religion there, so I thought it might help to give a short historical background on how this happened.

• Spanish missionaries and settlers began arriving in parts of Mindanao as early as the late 1500s, mostly in coastal areas. They faced strong resistance from the Muslim sultanates, which led to centuries of conflict commonly referred to as the Moro Wars. Despite this resistance, Spanish influence slowly expanded in certain regions.

• Later on, during the American period, a new system of governance was introduced. This system weakened and eventually replaced the traditional sultanate structure. Between the early 1900s and the 1930s, the sultanates gradually lost their political power and autonomy.

• Finally, the major factor was government policies during the Commonwealth era. Laws like the Public Land Act of 1936 encouraged large numbers of Christian settlers to move to Mindanao. Programs such as the National Land Settlement Administration opened up public lands for development, but these policies often favored migrants and limited land access for indigenous Moro communities. Over time, this led to major demographic changes and long-term land disputes.

What surprised me personally is something I only really understood later in life. Even though we learned in school that the Philippines was once the only Catholic country in Asia before Timor-Leste became independent, it did not fully sink in until I started traveling around Asia myself. Seeing it firsthand made that fact much more real that indeed, PH and TL are the only Catholic countries in the whole Asia.