When I visit a country for the first time, I try to read a novel written or set there. For my Philippines trip last month, I chose Noli Me Tangere by José Rizal. I knew nothing about it except that the title kept coming up in Google searches for ‘novels set in the Philippines’. I downloaded it on Kindle and started reading it on the plane going over to Manila.

A few days later I was talking at breakfast to one of our lovely hosts from Tourism Philippines and happened to mention that I’d been reading before bed the previous night. ‘What are you reading?’ she asked. I told her it was a novel called Noli Me Tangere. She looked at me in amazement, her fork poised in mid-air. ‘Oh my god, we read that book at school. Rizal is our national hero. I love that book.’

Our other host (another young woman in her twenties) came back from the breakfast buffet and joined in the conversation. ‘Noli Me Tangere? We studied it at school. Rizal is our national hero. I can’t believe you’re reading that!’ Later in the week I received a virtually identical reaction from the media manager at one of the hotels we visited. ‘We read that at school! Rizal is our national hero!’

It was only after I’d finished the novel, back at home a few weeks later, that I learned the reason for this seemingly universal response every time I mentioned Rizal and his novel. In 1956 the ‘Rizal Law’ came into force in the Philippines, requiring the life and writings of José Rizal, particularly his novels Noli Me Tangere(1887) and El Filibusterismo(1891), to be included in the curricula of all public and private schools, colleges and universities throughout the country. The Act identifies Rizal as ‘the national hero and patriot’ of the Philippines.

According to the Rizal Law, compulsory study of Rizal’s novels should promote in the country’s youth ‘a re-dedication to the ideals of freedom and nationalism for which our heroes lived and died’, ‘encourage civic conscience’ and ‘teach the duties of citizenship’. The Act mandated that the novels be translated from the original Spanish into English and Tagalog (the principal Filipino dialect), that they be available in cheap unexpurgated editions, and that there should always be a sufficient number of copies held in school and university libraries. I’ve never heard of any such law elsewhere in the world that safeguards and promotes the reading of particular works of fiction in this way.

Why did the Philippines government specifically call attention to the need for students to be able to read unexpurgated editions of Rizal’s works? Because the Catholic Church was so keen to censor them (if not suppress them outright). Noli Me Tangere is what’s called an anti-clerical novel – it mercilessly satirizes and sharply criticizes the Church hierarchy and its agents in the Philippines, clearly blaming them for the poverty and sufferings of ordinary Filipino people at the time it was written.

Rizal’s contempt for the avarice, dishonesty and cruelty of the priesthood as he saw it is so strongly expressed that of course it influenced my reaction to the religious monuments we visited as we travelled around the country. At the Baclayon Church on the island of Bohol a proud parishioner showed us around a dusty collection of silver chalices and crosses, together with ancient priestly vestments and costly jewels used for adorning the effigies of saints at religious festivals. All I could think was ‘trash and tinsel’. Having read Rizal’s account of the wretched poverty of the people whose labour paid for these things, the whole collection seemed wasteful and pointless – although it was impossible not to be moved by the woman’s obvious pride in the treasures of her church.

We left the church just as the great bells in the tower were being rung, and our photographer Adam captured a lovely image of the boys who were pulling the bell ropes. (He has kindly given me permission to include the picture at the head of this post.) I’d just read, the night before, the chapter in Noli Me Tangerewhere two young boys called Crispín and Basilio, children of a terribly disadvantaged peasant family, are punished by the head sacristan for not allegedly ringing the church bells in the proper timing. It’s a heart-breaking scene, expressing a sense of unfathomable injustice.

Not all parts of Rizal’s novel are as upsetting as this chapter. There are some very funny sections that poke fun at the pretensions of the more entitled members of society (both Spanish and Filipino). And there are beautiful, lyrical descriptions of the tropical landscape. But the prevailing sense is of waste – waste of life, youth, hope and talent, all sacrificed to protect a moribund religious and colonial system, regardless of the human cost.

The incredibly brilliant Rizal, who was a doctor and poly-linguist as well as a novelist, was executed by firing squad in Manila in 1896 at he age of 35, having been convicted of sedition because of his pro-independence message. Two years later, Spanish rule in the Philippines ended, although it would take another fifty years before the Philippines was recognized internationally as an independent republic.

Rizal called his novel ‘noli me tangere’, Latin for ‘don’t touch me’, referring to the ‘untouchable’ position of the Catholic Church in the Philippines at that time. As we travelled through this beautiful country and saw instances of the poverty that still remains, I thought of another Latin phrase, ‘primum non nocere’– first, do no harm. It’s part of the Hippocratic oath that doctors take before they are licensed to practise medicine, but it seems to me it should be an oath for all travellers to take before they enter other people’s countries.

You have to hope that in visiting a place like the Philippines, where there’s widespread poverty and social disadvantage as well as incredible beauty and energy, you are doing more good than harm. You hope that the money you spend is making people’s lives better. That the hotels where you stay and the tours you take are providing employment and income for people who would otherwise be worse off. That tourism means opportunity, not exploitation. And that children just like Crispín and Basilio have more chance of surviving and thriving within a tourist economy than under the old colonial system that Rizal deplored.