0.5 Opus dei book's darkened rizal & Why - chapter 5  (Page 4/14)

Break free this day timid minds from your chainsShackles fit for brutes bred in dark captivity;Climb to peaks of thought, talent, art, science, Dare thus to redeem self then people and others.

That is a natural freethinker’s song! It reverberates in his December 1882 letter to Paciano on how he wished people back home were more enlightened, honest, intelligent, progressive. How is it that the adolescent Rizal was already voicing such thoughts so early in his later full transformation towards freethinking Masonic scientific humanism and world citizenship? Rizal scholars know he could keep secrets, and put them in code in his diary, satires and essays. He restrained his freethinker’s outrage and ranting disgust with so much ignorance, absurd doctrines, superstitiousness, stupidity, dishonesty, injustice, etc. Thus such severities, thunder and lightning he toned down in the Noli me tangere while in Germany. Understandably, for prudence, he did not want to totally alienate his Catholic readers, religious family members, friends and countrymen. He certainly toned down letters to his very pious mother, worried sick about his growing dangerous apostasy, to the point of intentional vagueness in some letters to her. He hid deep feelings of disgust and revulsion at so much fanaticism, absurd inculcated doctrines and rituals. Perhaps too much did he at times soften his complete “shipwreck of faith.” Considering that his total cultural upbringing and education in the theocratic colony included imposed total indoctrination in Catholicism and instruction in defense and accord with it, how indeed was it possible to burst out at 18 with an essentially freethinker’s poem? You should reread aloud, word for word, that verse-gist of his youth’s noblest poem. Its central freethinker’s thoughts remained constant with him, up through the very end in what I’ve correctly called his December 30, 1896 Constancy Swan Song. For, constancy to earliest patriotic dreams, clamors, teachings and creed from about 17 on until death at 35 was its central running theme. This is utterly contrary to how the retraction-respecting nationalists who antedated and neutralized the poem tell its meanings. Visit historic Fort Santiago’s “Adios” room, and see what I mean—to your outrage I hope.

That is the Rizal his ignored and scorned friend, Dr. Trinidad Pardo de Tavera defended magnificently from both the retractionists and revolution-espousing nationalists. From my own work’s findings, I’d have to say Pardo de Tavera’s turns out to be the objectively accurate version of Rizal he made known to the conquering Americans at the end of the 19 ^th century and start of the 20 ^th . The baffled unbelieving racial supremacists couldn’t believe there existed such noble scientific humanist among natives whom they scorned as “Pacific Negroes.” But their own topmost leaders, scholars, biographers, writers, as a whole eventually confirmed Pardo de Tavera’s understanding of the hero. Those who overcame their racism embraced Rizal as their own admirable hero as well and co-sponsored his rise to chief national hero above all others. In respect to this chapter’s title-topic, it should be observed that they as a whole never insulted his character and Masonic scientific humanism, as the Spaniards and Filipinos cited here did. Rizal surely reminded the leading Spain-replacing Americans of the noblest thoughts of their own Enlightenment-inspired founding fathers and early leaders, many of them freethinkers and Masons themselves. Luck favored this confirmation of him as deserving chief hero because this nonviolent humanistic image of him suited their pacification needs and self-proclaimed civilizing mission of radically transforming a Fourth and Third World people towards the requirements of a future First World nation-state. Putting it in today’s modern terms, Pardo de Tavera told the surprised Americans that his close heroic friend Rizal sought most of all the total radical improvement of his people (from the Fourth and Third Worlds) towards parity in mentality and achievement levels with that of the First World.