0.2 Opus dei book's darkened rizal & Why - chapter 2  (Page 13/16)

As our country’s educators, historians, and opinion-makers you bear responsibility to keep abreast of the latest research findings in your field. Read then this charge I, and a few like-minded others, throw at you named ones who cover up your iconic subject in false overcoat under I’ve been calling nationalistic retraction-respecting paradigm. Read and re-read the evidence here presented, to ponder as never before. You have a duty, you know, to replace what you teach with the historically true one of Rizal, this unique man of science from the Fourth and Third Worlds, whom church-and-theocracy killed for championing individual rights towards self-transformation (and responsibility-taking) first. Mankind’s best humanities-and-science-oriented teachers, of which Rizal was one, will tell you that transforming education’s aim is not indoctrinating youth with dogmas but instilling a lifelong hunger for learning important truths, and unlearning errors along the way. You could say that nonviolent revolutionizing of the self (as he had done for himself) consumed him more than plotting violent pro-independence revolution (from which he actually recoiled). From growing up in your schools I know you don’t see it that way. At the state university I got indoctrinated about Rizal under what I now call the reigning nationalistic retraction-respecting paradigm, although we did very little reading. Very late in life I stumbled on Rizal’s riveting essays and satires, and read them for the first time, some over and over again to the point that in the mid-1990s I made, to my knowledge, the first intentionally literalist translation of what U.S. Senator George Hoar in January 1900 before his fellow legislators called Rizal’s Death Song. For, I found it too freely and misleadingly translated. Not one translator knew fully its context of being secretly finished and safely delivered to the world twice (in keepsakes and shoes) by Rizal himself at death. Did you know that? That put smiles on his face during his death walk, you know!

Dr. De Pedro’s seemingly authoritative and widely promoted book tried to prove that our iconic subject can be shown to have been a darkly intentioned ‘sham-freethinker’! For, in his core of cores he retained some absolute essentials of Catholic faith. Thus he only pretended to be a Catholicism-hating full Voltairean. Historicity of the Church’s retraction claim is that thesis’s underlying influencing premise. Did you know the famous Miguel de Unamuno thought likewise more than a century ago? “How else explain Rizal piously retracting in a full burst of faith?”, Unamuno concluded. Rizal must have managed to become at most half-a-freethinker. Some essential Catholic beliefs must have remained intact deep inside his romantic poetic soul, Unamuno further thought. This great man of Spanish literature and philosophy erred totally here. From my own more considerable research I found that not a single distinctively specific Catholic dogma remained intact in Rizal’s bone-deep scientific humanist core: from his own continuing scientifically oriented studies, including that of the real historical Jesus. But, will you named ones even read the evidence offered in this work to find out who has been more honest and truthful in the quest for the real historical Rizal? If you should adopt in class or recommend Dr. De Pedro’s Opus-Dei supported book, you should also consider this book-length critique of it, in fairness to our subject. You must know that you are not under vows of silence about these very sensitive matters.