0.2 Opus dei book's darkened rizal & Why - chapter 2  (Page 2/16)

The Opus Dei-sponsored book critiqued here renews, updates and further develops Catholicism’s retraction-influenced cover-ups of the church-condemned-and-martyred Masonic freethinker. This injustice struck chords of outrage in me all over again. I asked myself: “Why don’t they still see by this late day in the 21 ^st century the continuously growing virtual mountain of conclusive anti-retraction evidence? The Opus Dei scholars and intellectuals behind their widely promoted book don’t even seem to have an inkling of its existence. But they should know, if only subconsciously, that most of their claims on the hero’s core-identity depends on the truth of the Church’s key retraction document. And its chief witnesses and how they obtained it for living out accordingly throughout the last entire night of December 29-30, 1896. It must affect any book’s story of Rizal’s life, works, prime teachings, who really killed him really for what, and all other sorts of indirectly related matters. My retraction-disproving works and those of a few others since the mid-1990s have hardly made a dent in raising awareness to it. Only a handful seem to deeply care in resolving this shameful scandal of Philippine history, education and culture. A good unintended consequence of Dr. De Pedro’s Opus Dei book under review here is its bringing this costly tragic matter to the attention of both Filipinos and foreigners and so press harder for resolution.

In this critique’s paradigm-replacing view, Taliban-type churchmen’s demonizing and clamoring since 1887 and conviction of him as a people-corrupting Voltairean heretic, thus separatist enemy of Catholic Spain led to his arrest. At first in 1892 on planted anti-Catholic flyers in regard to his jailing, then transfer to the Jesuits’ Dapitan Mission Area for work on his retraction. Later he suffered re-arrest for the 1896 rebellion and after a rigged trial executedby firing squad. This obsession in extracting a full broad retraction by means fair or foul and the failed attempts at it predisposed revenge-seeking clerics to denounce him opportunistically as plotter of the 1896 rebellion. For the most informed insiders a death-dealing sentence appeared to give them the best last chances and conditions for obtaining the long-sought “trophy” retraction of this perceived most dangerous heretic: he who dared to attack both Catholicism and its theocratic union with the state. Which Indian heretic on his deathbed, assisted by persuasive priests would not reconvert back to his old faith?, they surely asked. In their white-supremacist view, quite normal back then, the most stubborn Indio heretics, at their most vulnerable dying moments, could be worked on to reconvert or retract and submit to Spanish priestly persuasions backed up by powerful reminders of Hellfire. If that failed, death brought favorable opportunities of pulling off a successful “Plan B” for present and future generations beyond the grave. Those who know well how the dangerously regarded Philippine-born secular priest Burgos in 1872 was convicted falsely to death for the naval soldiers’ mutiny in Cavite may see similarities here, including his immediate execution and that of the bribed chief witness to seal their lips forever. Ididn’t mean to go this far ahead of our long story. Clearer and detailed will all this be as you get deeper into this chapter and the next.