0.5 Opus dei book's darkened rizal & Why - chapter 5  (Page 9/14)

That is just plain dishonesty or delusion belied by the facts and Rizal’s own frank admission to Fr. Sanchez in the early months of 1893 of his definitely being an unbeliever. In that same period he also told that to Jesuit Superior Pastells in a strong letter: “I do not believe in the Revelation which each Religion claims to possess.” Even so you typically still get retraction-respecting nationalists like the activist scholar in the online RP-Rizal group, Edgar Millan. Among his dubious claims is a version of the retraction-respecters that the hero mostly, if not exclusively, attacked friar abuses but not core Catholicism itself, which he never left. We’ll revisit this hot topic again later, as it keeps popping up endlessly. It is, however, just one more in the reigning rampant misrepresentations of this chief Philippine hero whose countrymen as a whole have been thereby shown to be too intellectually lazy in the hard search for his core-identity. They have been shown by all this to prefer the lazy way of continuing to venerate without understanding.

Querida Filipinas: Oye!

In the final stanzas of the December 30, 1896 Constancy Swan Song Rizal literally wails: “Beloved Philippines, listen!” To the constancy of his patriotism, of his dreams for individual Filipinos since adolescence, of his clamors, beliefs, creed. And on who killed him. Not at all did his Third World countrymen listen nor critically read his poetic last will and testament, notwithstanding Quibuyen’s wild exaggeration of the revolutionary masses’ understanding of the poem in the framework of Christ’s Passion. I’d rather go along with historian Agoncillo’s view that the masses did not read nor really understand Rizal. Rather did his people, their leaders, educators, historians as a whole ignore his clear bitter cries of “Limpia vibrante nota sere para tu oido …Constante repitiendo la esencia de mi fé….Voy donde…la fé no mata.”Clean vibrant note for your ears I’ll be….Constant, repeating essentials of my creed…I go…where faith does not kill.” They glossed over all that, either mistranslated or misinterpreted its full defiant key words, lazily in complicity with that death poem’s retraction-influenced emasculators. What happened with respect to the hero’s death poem is similar to what the nationalistic mythmakers such as the self-contradicting memoirist, Dr. Valenzuela. His later mendacious recollections decades later reinvented Rizal as a violent separatist rebel and encouraged others to explain away his famous December 15, 1896 Anti-Rebellion Manifesto. You’ve got to read to believe how partisan nationalists like Dr. Quibuyen can do this trick in the most imaginative ways such as resort to a fancy “critical hermeneutics.” That is at least better than saying that Rizal lied ethically to his prime enemies, or that the manifesto in question was forged. Yet the hero himself in too many declarations and writings of 1896 including diary entries and last letters opposed bloody war with Spain. This is not to deny that deep disappointments years before must have tempted consideration of the violent option and long discussions of it its pros and cons. That is beside the point, however. The hard facts overall support the view of a patriotically humanist Rizal opposing the violent rising of 1896. Like it or not.