Gomburza

Gomburza, alternatively stylized as GOMBURZA or GomBurZa ("Gom" for Gómes, "Bur" for Burgos, and "Za" for Zamora), refers to three Filipino Catholic priests, Mariano Gómez, José Burgos, and Jacinto Zamora, who were executed by a garrote on February 17, 1872, in Bagumbayan, Philippines by Spanish colonial authorities on charges of subversion arising from the 1872 Cavite mutiny. The name is a portmanteau of the priests' surnames. Gomburza incurred the hatred of Spanish authorities for fighting for equal rights among priests and leading the campaign against the Spanish friars. They fought on the issues of secularization in the Philippines that led to the conflict of religious and church seculars. Their execution had a profound effect on many late 19th-century Filipinos; José Rizal, later to become the country's national hero, would dedicate his novel El filibusterismo to their memory. Mutiny by workers in the Cavite Naval Yard was the pretext needed by the authorities to redress a perceived humiliation from the principal objective, José Burgos, who threatened the established order. Burgos was a Doctor of Philosophy and Arts whose prominence extended even to Spain, such that when the new Governor and Captain-General Carlos María de la Torre arrived from Spain to assume his duties, he invited Burgos to sit beside him in his carriage during the inaugural procession, a place traditionally reserved for the archbishop and who was a Peninsular Spaniard. The arrival of the liberal de la Torre was opposed by the ruling minority of friars, regular priests who belonged to an order (Dominicans, Augustinians, Franciscans, etc.) and their allies in civil government. It was supported by the secular priests, most of whom were mestizos assigned to parishes and far-flung communities, who believed that the reforms and the equality that they wanted with peninsular Spaniards were finally coming. Not all orders...