0.5 Opus dei book's darkened rizal & Why - chapter 5  (Page 8/14)

The believer or respecters of his alleged retraction may prefer it titled in that vague lukewarm way. Led by the highly acclaimed scholar Jaime de Veyra they in fact emasculated it by antedating to a day or more before the last long night before his death. And by inventing Trinidad (or Narcisa, confusedly) as its risk-taking smuggler from the maximum-security prison on the early evening before execution morning. They gloss over its specific defiant constancy to earliest noble dreams, clamors, honor, beliefs, and who killed him. Never do they mention its most likely corrected draft in the shoes. You cannot use “Adios” as proof against the December 29-30, 1896 retraction, De Pedro joins them in saying towards the end of his book. It’s just valedictory to nation. Even the most published grandniece of the hero, Asuncion Lopez-Rizal Bantug, subscribed to that general retractionist “insult” of a demolition job on the historic poem. With like-minded establishment historians they scandalously enshrined that eviscerated version at the premier Rizal Museum-Shrine at Fort Santiago. Nor have Filipinos noticed nor cared to know about their effectively national poem’s depths and shameless misrepresentation above. And its finishing and planning during the long last night for secret assured delivery with the leftovers--later on execution day. Its corrected draft most likely hid in his shoes—for insurance. Hardly anyone I’ve known or met knows or accepts these facts. As I review these lines I wonder how the great U.S. Congressman Henry A. Cooper, main author of the Philippine [Autonomy]Bill of 1902, would react to all this about his favorite Asian hero and his poem. He is on record boldly telling an awed assembled U.S. House of Representatives about Rizal and his death poem, which he recited. The dying heroic poet finished writing it “on the night before his death….on the awful [long] night as he sat alone amidst the silence….in the height of mind and power of character….Where, on what soil, under what sky, did Tyranny ever claim a nobler victim?”

Right at the start of his researched thick book De Pedro assures his readers that Rizal was “never a pagan but a Catholic…” Towards the end, on page 307, still a Catholic, though a diminished one: “Rizal believed, but not in the fullness of Christian revelation”. De Pedro did find the hero transformed into a rationalist freethinker at age 22, but, to recall, it turns out, only an incomplete freethinker, half-baked at most. Underneath it all his core-identity remained Catholic and so considered himself a Catholic! That is downright disinformation under influence of the still reigning retraction-respecting paradigm. Combined religious, nationalistic and commercial needs have, alas, led to presentation of Rizal to his Catholic country as its Catholic nationalist hero killed by Spain for violent separatism. You can see that in the two Zaides’ commercial bestseller, their page 185 stating that “Rizal refused to give up his Catholic faith….He remained loyal to the Catholic religion.”