0.3 Opus dei book's darkened rizal & Why - chapter 3  (Page 4/21)

A Total Recanting

Not just purely religious belief, or minimal doctrinal requirements, are covered by the document in question, contrary to what the public knows from its still reigning misrepresentations. It’s actually a document of total retraction. From internal examination of its contents, we can right away ask this forgery-revealing questions: could the highly principled Rizal freely write and sign a practically total five-sentence retraction of beliefs, works and deeds? And why, then, did they still kill him? Take a deep look at the shockingly wide-ranging unqualified wordings. It turns him into a Taliban-type fundamentalist no less. Just like the Jesuit Pastells and regular priests (friars) who religiously deluded themselves into thinking and accusing that this church-state separatist was also “a fierce revolutionist….scandalizer and corrupter of his people,” as the former wrote in 1897. The document’s fourth and fifth sentence implicitly makes Rizal admit this, and makes him publicly apologize and seek pardon for causing such harms. The earliest anti-retractionists raised weaker versions of these evidence-backed negative arguments. Reformulated in the context of the document’s practically total nature, their retraction-falsifying questions acquire much greater conclusive force. Read each sentence below, especially from the second to the fifth. Aside from being a return to the faith of one’s youth, its manifesto-like declarations covered whole books, essays and acts. It’s not confined to just minimal dogmas of pure faith, as the ‘retractionists’ have dishonestly claimed or implied. Probably for the first time in your lives, readers, please carefully read and re-read each of the mentioned document’s five sentences; do this before you right away hurl attacks or insults at your anti-retractionist adversary. Help reverse the indolently stupid practice of typically fighting over the issue and sub-issues without first doing hard reading of the document. Write down a copy of it all you would-be intellectual discussants and combatants, have it before your eyes so you don’t revert to the old ways of immaturely developed humans trading insults for nothing.

Here then is a literalist translation of that document. Thus carefully laid out before you for examination it is no less than cumulatively “dynamite”! Let’s agree the first sentence refers to pure faith. But not From the second unqualified sentence to the fifth, for what it shockingly owns up, declares, implies galore. Note the manifesto-like formality entirely alien to Rizal’s personal explaining letter-style. If it were true, then its maker clearly surrendered his Enlightenment ideals. And all along he held no deep principled beliefs and convictions after all. His free-thinking Masonic scientific humanism did not go deep below beginner’s initial fascinations with its appealing socio-political uses. Precisely what Dr. De Pedro made much of in his book under review here. Precisely too what the world-famous Miguel de Unamuno, more than a century before, could not help concluding about the incompleteness of our iconic subject’s rationalism. Let us then read each phrase and line very attentively, very closely as that world-historic document deserves. If we seriously do so, at this analytical level alone Asia’s closest counterpart of Europe’s Galileo case can at long last be resolved decisively in our minds! Here and now. Because then you would not fail to hear and discern between the lines and in the words themselves its absolutist designing maker’s presence. Ask, right away upon close reading whose absolutist’s barely suppressed ranting and Catholic theocratic voice reverberates through its telltale phrases and sentences? Please don’t say with a straight face it sounds completely like Rizal’s voice and style, now denouncing his Church-condemned works and Masonic scientific humanism (which the next chapters show ran to bone-deep core levels). Examine the fifth in its internal and external contexts: it impliedly retracts clamors against maladministration badly needing change. Even more as we’ll see.