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

That’s putting it in modern terms but that is what the martyred Masonic freethinker Rizal was about, he who in 1892-1893 firmly told Jesuits Sanchez and Pastells that he was an unbeliever. Strangely, De Pedro himself noted that in the school year 1878-79 in Manila the 17-year-old “Rizal himself started to doubt everything, to question everything. Is it possible the storm refers to in his Memorias , initiated just a year later, refers to these doubts?” Yes, Dr. De Pedro, in view of this chapter and the previous one. And in view of his poetic freethinker’s cry at 18. The previous chapter suggested the historically momentous induction into Church-condemned and demonized (as Satanic) Freemasonry took place in Madrid, this with help from his own highly impressed Masonic professor. Most likely when he was still 21, especially in view of his just mentioned freethinker predilections when still in adolescence. A very large overlap in both membership and beliefs existed between Masonry and freethinking rationalism. The former’s popular Scottish Rite motto is an Enlightenment freethinker’s creed as well: “Human progress is our cause, liberty of thought our supreme wish, freedom of conscience our mission, and equal rights to all people our ultimate goal.” A deeply shared value of both was lifelong study for continuous improvement of mind and morals. In Masonry Rizal found another learning center for deepening his Masonic scientific humanist studies. It believed too in church-state separation and the required belief in a nonsectarian Architect of the Universe. As a typical scientific rationalist freethinker of the times, Rizal believed in such a deistic-theist God. He prayed to it but without asking for personal favors and miracles on his and others’ behalf. It or he was for him guide to conscience and moral choices. Its or his chief revelation was to be apprehended from nature itself and not scriptures. At times he described unknowable qualities of his ineffable God in agnostic terms and overtones. Most if not all Masons of his acquaintance thought like him in a fully liberal-progressive brotherhood of self-improvement seekers. His turning into a Mason when still 21 follows naturally in the wake of his previously cited budding freethinker’s poem of 1879, and the December 1882 letter to Paciano.

That’s the creed he supposedly denounced in his sweepingly worded retraction. Rather did he firmly reaffirm it defiantly in his December 30, 1896 Constancy Swan Song: “Constant am I in repeating the essentials of my faith.” He explained to Fr. Pastells a few years earlier that he used the word “faith” in its sense of factually and logically reasoned beliefs, rather than in the usual sense of “fe”, or

faith. He used that one-syllable word in his poems because, unlike English. Spanish lacked a powerful and poetic one-syllable word for creed or belief, other than “fe”. He surely included his belief in Masonry’s faith or creed in that quoted line from Adios. His Masonic humanist creed ever deepened in his mature years, as in his famous 1890s speech before his Masonic brotherhood, on “Science, Virtue, Work in Masonry.” Some telltale passages from it: “Humanity will not be redeemed while reason is not free, while faith will continue to impose against the facts, while whims are laws…” A ringing passage reminded them of the faith-fed eliminationist persecutions of such thinkers as Copernicus, Bruno, Galileo, and many other scientists and philosophers eager to make their contributions to the times’ emerging modern thought. Those inquisitorial persecutions, threats, demonizations delayed the progress of science for centuries, he stressed in that talk and essay. He mentioned that these innovators of thought found protection and a home in Masonry. He attacked obscurantist churchmen, those befuddled who “called virtue believing in the impossible and rejecting the conclusions of science and experience.” And for regarding blind “belief in the absurd” as virtue.