0.3 Opus dei book's darkened rizal & Why - chapter 3  (Page 6/21)

Let us note that the friar-controlled newspaper’s earliest announced version differed in important respects from other ones on that day, and the next, and much later both in Manila and in Spain. Those earlier ones, except for the most delayed Jesuit one, which rapidly evolved into the official Church version, never mentioned the most unlikely Jesuit Balaguer as principal obtainer of the long-sought retraction document. Nor was he ever reported to have been one of the many visitors allowed to enter Rizal’s death cell. He surfaced weeks later with the anonymous (Pastells, it turned out) announcement in Barcelona of the final version. Previous earlier announcements in Manila and Madrid named other individual Jesuits as chief obtainers. The most convincing among these named Fr. Faura. It movingly told in detail how he, as Rizal’s highly revered teacher from way back, obtained it. This appeared in a leading Spanish newspaper in Madrid, again arousing suspicions for being told there but not in Manila. (He was then terminally ill, dying less than three weeks later.) The Barcelona newsmagazine for youth controlled by the Jesuits anonymously announced what became the sole official version for both the Spanish and Philippine branches of Catholicism, and so too for international Catholicism.

That is a revealingly self-falsifying process of naming a convert’s ‘converter’, in addition to the non-existence of the original supposedly done in the death cell. The duo of converter and convertee are necessarily uniquely paired from the start, including immediately upon public announcement. Not so in Rizal’s case. Why? Did the ailing Fr. Faura object to playing the role of official ‘converter’, and so wrote a note to that effect (it still awaiting discovery in some Jesuit archive)? If not, some such revealing disclosure from another Jesuit may yet be found. This late second-best anointing of Balaguer suspiciously as well featured a mini-rerun of the famous nine-letter debate between Rizal and Jesuit Superior Pastells in 1892-93, before the latter’s return to Spain. His intense theological and philosophic efforts sought his former student’s return to both Church and State. With its implicit promise of release from Dapitan, it failed to win the church-state separatist Rizal back to the old faith and its theocracy. But this time in the death cell Pastells’ resurrected brief in the hands of Balaguer won out. And who should the anonymous announcer of the official weeks-late Balaguerian version? It is our old friend Pastells himself, in Barcelona! No wonder he sought holy silence and anonymity. No wonder during his lifetime he refused to publicly release his complete copy of the Nine-Letter Rizal-Pastells Debate. My source on this is Spanish researcher Retana in his monumental Rizal biography published in Madrid in 1907.

Pastells played again this suspiciously secretive author’s role months later in 1897 in his Rizal-denouncing book subtitled “Rizal y su obra”. This reproduced the year’s earlier announced Balaguerian version. His book defended and exonerated Jesuit education from the charge of contributing to the 1896-97 uprising. It put all of the blame on free-thinking Masonry and its ruthless use of Rizal for subversion and armed rebellion. Spain’s Barcelona Archbishopric approved Pastells’ announcement and book with its Balaguer-version (and inputs from Pastells very likely), and it quickly became Catholicism’s official version of Rizal’s alleged retraction. It replaced all the other conflicting versions earlier announced. Here was another big reason for showing the genuine document, to allay suspicions caused by the revealingly self-falsifying process leading to Balaguer’s anointing. Add this to its enormous model effects and propaganda value), and still it was never photographed nor shown, except in 1935. They lost it somehow, and would look for it the top Jesuits and Dominicans said. Clearly, the original supposedly done in the death cell didn’t yet exist on December 29-30, 1896. And for more days and weeks at the very least. Only its fabricated text did.