Carlos Celdran, a Philippine cultural activist and performance artist who received national attention for his dramatic protest against the Roman Catholic Church’s stance on reproductive health, died on Tuesday in Spain, where he had been living in exile. He was 46.
His wife, Tesa, announced his death on Facebook. No other details were given.
In 2010 Mr. Celdran interrupted a Mass at the storied Manila Cathedral, dressed as José Rizal, an author who was considered a national hero after being executed by the Spanish in 1896 for leading a peaceful revolt against the colonial government. Mr. Celdran carried a large sign that read “DAMASO” — a reference to Father Damaso, a character from one of Mr. Rizal’s novels who symbolized corruption in the church.
In attendance were leaders of the church, whom he criticized for their role in blocking the passage of a reproductive health bill that would have helped the country’s poorest women gain access to contraceptives.
The Philippines is Asia’s only predominantly Catholic nation, and it is the only state aside from the Vatican that still bans divorce. Catholicism plays an outsize role in the country’s political life as well, despite the separation of church and state spelled out in its constitution. The church was instrumental in galvanizing a so-called people power movement that led to the ouster of the dictator Ferdinand Marcos after his brutal two-decade rule.
The reproductive health bill, which set off a heated national debate, was stalled for more than a decade because of the church’s opposition. The Philippine Congress ultimately approved it in 2012.
Birth control was already legal and available in the Philippines, but the cost of condoms, birth control pills and other contraceptive methods made them inaccessible to the very poor. The measure allowed for government health centers, including those in remote areas, to offer free or subsidized birth control options. It also required that sex education be provided in public schools.
The church had equated contraception with abortion, which is illegal in the Philippines.
Mr. Celdran’s protest, on Sept. 30, 2010, lasted just a few minutes before he was arrested. A Supreme Court decision last year, upholding a lower court’s decision from 2011, declared that he was guilty of “offending religious feelings” because his stunt was “meant to mock, insult, and ridicule those clergy whose beliefs and principles were diametrically opposed to his own.”
He faced about a year in prison, but he fled to Spain.
“The life throws a curve ball,” he said in a message to a friend who owned a bar in Manila. “For now, all is good. At least my exile isn’t Siberia.”
Mr. Celdran was born on Nov. 10, 1972, and grew up in Dasmariñas Village, in the Philippine city of Makati. He began his art career as a cartoonist for a newspaper in Manila when he was 14. In 1991 he enrolled in the Rhode Island School of Design, where he began doing performance art.
He later lived in New York City, where he witnessed the effects of the H.I.V. epidemic and began thinking about reproductive health and the importance of access to contraception.
Back in Manila in 2000, he found work as an assistant director for the Heritage Conservation Society, a nonprofit organization that seeks to preserve historical sites. In 2002 he started a walking-tour company, Walk This Way, and in 2005 he became the creative director of an art exhibition space in Manila, the Living Room.
Information on survivors was not immediately available.
Mr. Celdras had a charm that appealed as much to people in Manila’s glitzy hotels as to people in the slums, where his friends included cigarette vendors and drivers of the horse-drawn carts that plied the tourist neighborhoods.
“When he talked to me about Manila, the Manila I see through his eyes is one of the 1930s — pristine, quaint and full of lively, beautiful people,” Inky Santiago Nakpil, a close friend, said.
Mr. Celdran adapted some of his walking tours into stage performances.
He said his most popular work was “If These Walls Could Talk,” a one-man show that he presented onstage in Manila for more than 17 years.
A tour that focused on Imelda Marcos, the former first lady of the Philippines, became a solo Off Broadway show called “Livin’ la Vida Imelda” in 2014. Reviewing his performance, Anita Gates wrote in The New York Times: “Mr. Celdran’s one-act presentation is more like a gleefully gossipy study guide. If you examine it closely, you’ll see that it’s mostly just a lecture with black-and-white slides, but Mr. Celdran’s charm and showmanship turn it into genuine theater.”
