0.2 Opus dei book's darkened rizal & Why - chapter 2  (Page 14/16)

How would you like it if that famous Opus Dei-exploiting Dan Brown of “The Da Vinci Code” were to claim having dug up from archaeological excavations a letter of retraction from Jesus recanting faith in himself as the Jewish messianic claimant, in favor of his real brother, James the Just? As Catholics you would rightly bristle with outrage, as you did when he portrayed Jesus as being married to Mary Magdalene. Or when he abused Opus Dei by making his book’s albino killer a pious adherent of it like Dr. De Pedro. Well, many Rizal admirers worldwide (mainly foreigners I find) are outraged by Catholicism’s claims about their idol’s alleged retraction of his Church-condemned Masonic and scientific humanist beliefs, works, deeds. You would be right to demand from such a staggeringly extraordinary claim corresponding amounts of extraordinary evidence. But did you make such a reason-based demand? Most ‘anti-retracionists’ I know have taken serious looks at the Church-promoted evidence for Rizal’s retraction. Is it too much to likewise ask Catholic endorsers and respecters of that alleged five-sentence retraction to examine it phrase by phrase and line-by-line, as I do in the next chapter? Is it too much to ask you to look into what my earlier claim of an ever-growing virtual mountain of conclusive anti-retraction evidence? What, you’ve never heard of it? I reply bitterly: “No wonder that Philippine education, when internationally tested and compared against the bar-raising advanced First World’s, yields indicators of being trapped in the Fourth and Third Worlds, as it comparatively was in Rizal’s times.”

You must realize by now from this consciousness-raiser how all-important is one’s stance on the retraction: in writing any original or major work on our iconic subject. Be it a profitable textbook or movie, a biography or play. Even our religiously safe obsessions with the hero’s zealous nationalism and romances are consciously or unconsciously influenced by our stance on the alleged retraction. Although I praise Dr. De Pedro’s book for accepting the evidence on its subject’s principled opposition to the pro-independence uprising of 1896, I still lump him overall with those writing under the spell of the reigning retraction-respecting nationalistic paradigm. Not just for championing the retraction but for his book’s promotion of the reigning paradigm’s wrong teaching that Spain itself killed Rizal as an accused rebel. Like them, he does not probe deep underneath that legal formality to see, as Retana did, for the decisive role of church-and-theocracy and their puppets in his arrest, trial and death. I expand on that view here, noting that one more indicator of the strong religious motive in his death was the long-nursed obsession to finally obtain his retraction, by means fair or foul. Opportunities for this abounded at his most vulnerable last hours in the throes of death. Hence the most informed fanatical absolutists clamored for his trial unto death and none of these priests asked for mercy when death was meted out. More on this later, but maybe we should stop here for another break to reflect further on these very weighty matters.