0.5 Opus dei book's darkened rizal & Why - chapter 5  (Page 14/14)

Why would a bone-deep scientific rationalist attend Sunday church during his confinement in Dapitan, regularly during the first year at least, and much less so later? Out of gratitude for the Jesuits’ saving him from a horrible fate in a Fort Santiago jail but now under joint Jesuit and government supervision. Both sets of theocratic authorities and the townspeople themselves and his own pious mother expected to see him in church on Sundays. A diehard freethinker’s refusal would totally alienate them and probably send him back to jail, trial, and death. Sundays at church doubled as Dapitan’s regular sociocultural event, providing him with opportunities to study the town, its people and make friends. For prudence’s sake he didn’t want to fuel rumors of his being a subversive and a dangerous Church-enemy. He was always gathering materials for potential novels, satires, essays, poems, and for his ethnological and scientific interests. My point is that Rizal had many reasons for attending Sunday Mass during his first year at least, and irregularly later, for reasons other than to participate as a believer in the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass and related other sacraments. There he would stand in the back part of the Jesuits’ St. James Church, for his own reasons. Then there was his importuning pious mother suffering from untold torments because of his apostasy. Maybe that would ease it a bit to mention in a letter in passing that here in Dapitan he attended Sunday Mass. When he gained more confidence, and his disagreements with retraction-seeking Fr. Obach grew, he discontinued the regular Sunday practice. But his polite firm resistance to Jesuit importunities to retract, and his unpublished explosively anti-Catholic writings secretly drafted there show conclusively that his church attendance had nothing to do with a practicing believer’s participation in the Catholic Mass. Catholic intellectuals should stop straining for retraction-supportive implications of such half-truths as the above. They should instead go deep into this work’s virtual mountain of conclusive anti-retraction evidence right in front of their faces, mocking and shaming them for still denying its existence.

Who Insults More?

What emerges here and the previous chapter is the still unknown central core identity of Rizal. He desired above all else the radical transformation of his Fourth and Third World peoples’ mentality, character, culture and religion towards adaptive parity with the advanced First World. Such a revolution of the mind and morals he stood for but perceived Catholicism and its theocracy in Spain’s Southeast Asian colony as the most powerful enemy-obstacle to it. Can we then please have no more general nonsense that he did not attack the Catholic religion? Or that he remained a Catholic though attacking it once in a while like some Catholics do? Or that he considered himself to be one in the midst of his darkest and most critical times of near complete shipwreck of faith.

The same goes for his alleged revolutionary nationalism against Spain in 1896: can we stop denying the clear strong facts of his vehement opposition to it, regardless of whether we agree or not? We owe that honest objectivity to him and to ourselves. Instead of looking stupid in denying the facts why don’t we instead plumb the depths of his reasoning to find out why he would boldly, if not heroically oppose armed revolt in 1896. Likewise should we stop respecting his alleged complete retraction of basic beliefs and works including Masonry. And implied confession in its fifth sentence that he supported the rebellion when he most clearly did not. We also owe it to him and to ourselves for the sake of honesty, fairness and truth to grapple with this work’s virtual mountain of conclusive no-retraction evidence. Please don’t say, as some scholars of the cited RP-Rizal group did after a very intense exchange I had with them that more conclusive proof should be piled up on that mountain. No, no, no, you diehard doubting Thomases! Of course that mountain of anti-retraction evidence can be made much more massive, as indeed it will become as we move along in this unfinished work. But what’s the point? When that’s done you’ll likely just say, “More conclusive proof!” I have a much better suggestion. You’d do much better to reread these first five chapters, for reexamination and review and because serious critical reading is rereading one more time at least. However, this superior suggestion to piling up more and more no-retraction evidence requires the will to overcome mental and moral indolence (which the famous essay on that general subject and the Noli considered among peoples’ vices, defects, weaknesses for exposure as a cancer).

On my way to finalizing this for the printer this news item from November 20 of Philippine Inquirer grabbed my attention. An insulting vandal had defaced his modestly huge monument in Madrid with the words “Mason de mierda!” In rough English that’s “Shit of a Mason!” Before you react, think again: Who insults more grossly really? That “mierda” vandal or the De Pedro-Pastells-types? The latter with their retraction-rooted insults on Rizal’s character and on his Masonic freethinker’s convictions. Think out of the box and ask: Who really are the worst “mierda” attackers? And whose attacks have been more character-assassinating and false. No, I’m not a Mason but just basically reporting facts from my own research. I’ve wished, however, that Masons had done a stronger sustained job at defending one of their finest martyrs ever. They hold the record, though, of being the only ones officially as an organization to defend him from the retraction-rooted insults to his character and own evolved creed.

On the other hand his family and relatives down the ages as a whole and his so-called knight-defenders and its youth-women affiliates did not rise firmly to defend him from the retraction-rooted attacks on his character. They accepted in effect his enemy’s retraction-respecting nationalistic paradigm. All as a whole behaved through the ages as if the objective search for truth and understanding didn’t matter much. Except that it did matter the most to our church-and-theocracy killed freethinker! Don’t we really owe this world-heroic paragon of honor, virtue and excellence a duty of finding out about his central core-identity that naturally emerged at around 17? And only kept developing eve more fully into Masonic scientific humanism whose pillars, to recall similar words from columnist R. Tiglao’s nice piece of December 30, 1896 were “the power of rationality and individual freedom [including human perfectibility] against the superstition and blind obedience to the [theocratic]Catholic Church…. the nearly overpowering ideological base of Spanish colonialism.” Rizal defiantly regarded the former to be his main enemy for preventing what he above all else struggled for to the death: “the creation of a (free) people honest, prosperous, intelligent, virtuous, noble, loyal”, to quote his oft-repeated words. That is the doubly framed patriotic humanist killed by church-and-theocracy worthy of veneration with understanding. It is not the accidental one from past coincidences and false teachings under influence of the retraction-respecting nationalistic paradigm; and which wrongly teaches his being simply killed as a charged rebel-nationalist by his main enemy, colonial Spain itself.