0.3 Opus dei book's darkened rizal & Why - chapter 3  (Page 8/21)

Recall that Balaguer’s belated version first emerged in a faraway place in which no informed dissenter could dispute it: in Barcelona, not in Manila. Not even in Spain’s main newspapers, which probably would have asked questions about that belated entirely new version. It would have asked for name and some background of the person making the announcement. In the biweekly Jesuit newsmagazine for youth did the new detailed retraction story appear starting mid-January 1897 in three biweekly installments. How bizarre indeed! In its elaborated Pastellsian details. Balaguer would have us believe that a bone-deep philosophic scientific humanist (documented further in the next chapters), overly conscious of his principles and legacy, caved in to later take dictation on his retraction from the absolutist fundamentalist Balaguer. As authorized by his Archbishop and Jesuit Superior. Could the practically retraction-immune freethinker freely write and sign the sweeping five-sentence retraction of every important belief and act he otherwise championed; in a relatively short pontificating manifesto so alien to his longer explaining letter-style; worded irresponsibly in broad unconditional terms concerning beliefs, convictions of one’s lifelong studies, works and deeds and making him sound like an absolutist fundamentalist himself? That’s what leaps out increasingly from the first sentence on to the final fifth. Building on the very broad second sentence, the following third shouts in a crescendo, “I submit myself to whatever she [the Church] commands”. Recall the previous one’s sweeping “whatever is contrary to my quality as a son of the Church”. The following third sentence indeed surrenders totally to “whatever she [the Catholic Church]teaches”. The abjuration of Masonry certainly covers much more than essentials of faith. As Rizal’s famous piece on Masonry’s philosophy of individual perfection through labor, virtue and science attests to, he considered Masonry pragmatically synonymous with his freedoms-loving scientific humanism itself. These overly broad and loud declarations culminate in the final fifth sentence’s public apology to the people, right after the apology to God, for the harms his scandalous acts actually had caused (correct translation here of the present perfect subjunctive phrase of the original Spanish being used for indicating and describing a past event).

Again it should be underscored: the hardly veiled voice of a theocratic fundamentalist reverberates throughout the relatively short document, not unlike the ranting vengeful voice of the Dominicans and Augustinians who issued condemnations of him and his book in the late 1880s and asked for his arrest for both unspeakable heresies and subversion. The Jesuits too at the time were of the same mindset, as typified by Pastells in his absolutist’s alternately threatening and pleading letters to the hero. And in his anonymous 1897 “Rizal y su obra”, which raged against his former student, believe or not, as “a fierce revolutionist and….the scandalizer and corruptor of his own people.” He was rightly hounded out of the country by the religious orders in 1888 and rightly convicted to death, he wrote and implied. His secret book re-echoed and reproduced the mid-January Balaguer version of the retraction and its immediate aftermath, thus revealing too his secret role in the mentioned mid-January announcement. That, and the Barcelona Archbishopric-approved book’s authorship the Jesuits have yet to fully identify, acknowledge, explain and apologize for. The Jesuit Bonoan’s mid-1990s book on the hero merely made passing references in footnotes to the “Obra’s” authorship by Pastells, although it admitted Rizal that famous 1892-1893. Balaguer’s tales of the total conversion including Rizal’s completing acts of self-abasement and piety throughout the night, capped by a quick purely verbal marriage to Josephine near dawn appeared truly miraculous, the Jesuits said. Triggered and mediated most likely by the image of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, which the miraculously recanting one carved long ago when still a student. Divinely inspired that idea of taking it with them to the death cell, they further said.