Protestant denominations (composing around 2.8% of the Filipinos) and their educational institutions also serve Catholic students in Iloilo, who make up 83% of the population. Seizure of friar lands and parishes and the above-mentioned Protestant activities gave the American and Filipino public an impression of an anti-Catholic stance of the U.S. occupation of the Islands during the first years of the American rule. The Taft Commission, the sole legislative body of the American government for the Philippines (then known as the Philippine Islands under the sovereign control of the United States) while still under the Philippine–American War, were attacked by Catholic press in New York for anti-Catholic bigotry. Soon, pressures from influential Catholics in the United States, and also in Ireland caused President Theodore Roosevelt to appoint a Catholic in the commission to defend Catholic interest in the Philippines. Influential Catholics in Manila followed suit. Worries about Catholic vote in national elections moved the civil government to send the commission to the Vatican to negotiate exploring workable to solutions to the Catholic question in the newly acquired territory. Before coming to Rome, the head of the Commission personally visited the Cardinal Archbishop of Baltimore. Pace by pace, acceptable solutions were employed. In 1902, the President of the United States of America commissioned two American Augustian friars to pioneer a movement to send American priests out to the Philippines to replace the Spanish friars, who diminished in number (1,013 in 1898 to 246 in 1903) due to normal loss of personnel due to death or retirement, death caused by native hostilities, or voluntary return to Spain. In Iloilo, American Catholics countered the Protestant American missions and the American Catholic bishops, like Frederick Rooker, Dennis Joseph Dougherty, and James McCloskey, were named for the Roman Catholic See of Jaro in Iloilo City. These bishops sustained the educational achievements of the Spanish friars by bringing in American and European Catholic missionaries, among whom were the Sisters of Charity of St. Paul, and Augustinian missionary priests. The Augustinians, who were the first to bring the Christian faith in the Philippines as well as in Panay island, and who built the centuries-old heritage churches in this island, established the Collegio de San Agustín in 1904, which eventually became the only university of the Augustinian Order in Asia. During the American regime, their confreres from the United States developed evermore this institution, which later became the