0.3 Opus dei book's darkened rizal & Why - chapter 3  (Page 9/21)

Converting Differently If He Did So

Suppose Rizal had truly desired for his own spiritual reasons at death to reconvert back to the old faith of his birth and youth. But why do so in a shockingly irresponsible and disruptive secretive way? In sweepingly worded and unexplained manifesto-like declarations of a Taliban-type Dominican Archbishop and Jesuit Superior. In their style totally alien to the style of his longer explaining letters. As in the two mid-1892 secret letters to be opened at death; the mid-December 1896 Letter to Countrymen; the December 30,1896 Letters to Paciano and to the entire family, etc. Contrast Rizal’s case to the previously mentioned much-longer Galileo and Quezon retractions. Worlds apart they were in regard to proper transparent witnessing and announcement procedures. No need for calling in the world’s best handwriting experts for a consensus-authentication. Whether you like or hate it, there is no way of denying their authenticity. Take Rizal’s repeatedly disputed mid-December 1896 Letter to Countrymen condemning the uprising against Spain. No matter how zealous nationalists have cursed or scorned him for it, no one except a few extremists, have questioned its authenticity as a document. It deserves a straight acceptance as such, although one can still regard him as the nonviolent revolutionary reformist Godfather of the Philippine Independence Movement broadly conceived, while Andres Bonifacio fathered its violent revolutionary wing.

Jesuits, other churchmen, Catholic historians and educators have dishonestly misrepresented Rizal’s alleged retraction as one about pure faith’s minimal doctrinal requirements for Church membership. Far from it, we should note again, from both internal and external analysis of its contents. In the totally charged context of the times the issuing of such broad, vague and unconditional declarations included their broader religious and politico-philosophic meanings. In fact the Spanish press at the time rightly described the historic document as a comprehensive retraction of beliefs, works, acts, errors against both Church and State. The Manila correspondent of “El Heraldo de Madrid” cabled on December 29, 1896 that, to quote, he “had been assured that Rizal would retract his errors against the Church and State”. The following day, December 30, the correspondent of Madrid’s “El Imparcial” recalled that up to the previous day’s mid-afternoon “the convict continued to refuse confession and maintained his philosophical and political theories”. Let us then tolerate no more the endless shameless dishonesties from the retraction’s defenders that their venerated or respected document only referred to minimal doctrinal requirements of pure faith. It just isn’t so, and a total demolition job it thus heaps on the well-known principled, courageous and responsible character of this martyred world-hero. If true, it totally undermines his moral authority and example, and that of his prime teachings. Let us rightly insist that in contrast to the great Catholic scientist Galileo, who lived to more than twice Rizal’s age, the latter Indio or Indian young man of science from the Fourth and Third Worlds was much more committed to the supremacy of reason and its self-correcting scientific ways than was the former, and comparable in quality to his admired scientific humanists Voltaire and Darwin. To say he retracted is like saying that the retraction-immune Voltaire and Darwin could have done so as well.