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Does he ever strain with extreme difficulty to explain those two intertwined weird claims! On page 119, he grants that Rizal’s “God was less and less the God of Christian revelation…. He found it difficult to accept the divinity of Christ.” On another page: “A near disappearance in his Catholic faith,” could be discerned. But “always (he) preserved the fundamentals of Christian faith.” On page 187, he harps on the Unamuno-like attack on Rizal as a half-baked or dilettantish freethinker: “He had flirted with rationalism … [and] brought harm to the faith of many others in his self-proclaimed role of religious reformer.” And in his role of the dark avenger (like the second novel’s Simoun) of religious injustices done by excessively clericalist priests. Yes, he only pretended to be a fully anti-Catholic rationalist.

Rizal, a freethinker-rationalist flirt and pretender? That is just really too much to distill from believing the Church’s retraction story. But on second thought, maybe not. For, how else was Rizal able to return back to the old church so completely in self-surrender and as implied by the unconditionally worded five-sentence retraction manifesto? This thought is always with De Pedro, as in his earlier-cited announcement of his freethinker find about Rizal at age 22 in Paris. That conversion was mostly rage-and-revenge driven, not the deeply intellectual moral one of fully fledged freethinkers. Deep inside he somehow remained a Catholic. This myth culminates in another on page 269: “He considered himself to be a Catholic even in his darkest and most critical hours, although his position was utterly inconsistent with this.” Really he was just too emotionally driven in totally blackening his hated theocratic friar-priests as total purveyors of falsehoods, including those dogmas, doctrines, rituals at the heart of their revealed organized faith.

With such a dark view of Rizal’s personality and character, De Pedro believed Jesuit Obach’s first tale in 1895 about Rizal wanting to retract in exchange for a marital permit. In Obach’s later second tale he disclosed in the exchange of letters with his Superior Ricart it was no longer for marriage that drove the hero to think of retracting. Now the stakes were: his freedom, plus generous amounts of money and land! These are retraction-influenced demolition jobs yet again on Rizal’s true principled character, with no presentation of documents to back up the Obach-Ricart slurs. The original Jesuits themselves who knew Rizal would have been able to tell De Pedro that their former student was no longer a Catholic. Fully an apostate-heretic, Jesuit Superior Pastells in a memorable 1893 letter implied: “You took the great leap [of unbelief]… plunging into the abyss of treason from the Catholic Religion and the Spanish nation, and you hoisted the flag of subversion.” In his 1897 “Rizal y su obra”, he held on to that and agreed with the theocracy’s finding and death sentence. By the way, today’s modern pluralistic Jesuits should probe Pastells’ mysterious key role in the belated anointing of the clumsy Balaguer as the Church’s obtainer of the five-sentence retraction manifesto. His sinister Invisible Hand, kept secret for decades, is all over the 1897 announcements in Barcelona naming Balaguer as the Church’s chief witness-obtainer of Rizal’s alleged retraction according to the Church’s approved formula. What was the total relationship between the two? Where are the communications between them on this matter?

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Source:  OpenStax, Opus dei book's darkened rizal & Why. OpenStax CNX. Mar 20, 2011 Download for free at http://cnx.org/content/col11225/1.2
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