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

From being a former Catholic I know that the deeper studies and dedicated detective research I urge you to do on these matters fall outside official Catholicism’s list of absolutely binding infallible dogmas. This area of studies is not like the forbidden uncontrolled search for the real historical Jesus and Christian origins that has been heating up in the last two centuries, but just beginning to make inroads in the public’s mind. Going ahead of our subject, I might as well say that its basic findings on a purely Jewish messianic claimant later deified influenced Rizal’s full conversion towards free-thinking scientific rationalism. Catholics are free of such dogma-imposed prohibitions in regard to research on Rizal, even if they should agree with next chapter’s conclusive no-retraction findings. Unlike the original perpetrators of the retraction’s fabrication, you are not expected to be bound by vows of secrecy and silence. More and more Catholics of late, less respectful of organized religions in general, have been accepting the ever-mounting conclusive evidence on the forgery and of the retraction. They accept, no matter how reluctantly, the undeniable existence of what metaphorically I’ve called “the in-your-face virtual mountain of conclusive anti-retraction evidence.” It is further described and sampled for you in the next chapter, this itself being a condensed updated disproof of the retraction. You can curse him all you like, as some hispanofilipinos I’ve met still do, this fully Voltairean and Catholicism-hating martyr shining through to the top of this evidence-mountain. But no longer fight it, or repeat the popular reality-denying baloney of “It does not matter whether he retracted or not.”

You can hate too his free-thinking scientific rationalism. The same goes for his gradualist humanistic patriotism focused on radical self-improvements first within a regime of individual freedoms and church-state separation, whether politically independent or not. Just don’t misrepresent or reinterpret away his true self and prime teachings. You can dislike him, as many ideological nationalists do, for his categorical opposition to ‘1896’, but don’t continue misrepresenting it as something else and that deep down he was really for armed revolution. Don’t explain away his December 1896 anti-rebellion letter as a forgery either, as some I’ve debated online did, because that makes you look like a ridiculous extremist. I recall protesting online too at the time a retraction-endorsing nationalist Vice President Guingona’s claims that Rizal supported Bonifacio’s war against Spain. All this is just dishonest, not backed by the full evidence of his writings, testimonies and deeds. Read the informative late1980s book on this by Bonifacio Gillego and endorsed by the noted historian Agoncillo; let it put historic closure to this big retraction-affected issue of Philippine history. Our only concern as objective students of Rizal history should be the long-overdue uncovering of his real historical self. And what he firmly stood for, “constantly repeating,” as he cried in his death poem. As he contrasted yet again for the last time to “the faith of those who killed” him. By the way, you don’t know, do you, Rizal actually fingered those who ultimately framed and killed him? The next chapter’s disproof of the retraction proves too the awesome principled character of his church-condemned convictions. And it makes his Constancy Swan Song’s claim that faith killed him all the more true.

Please check me out in the next chapter regarding what you surely regard outrageous and conceited claims about conclusively disproving the alleged retraction. If you don’t, the Rizal-deplored “lamentable indolence predisposition” in its intellectual and ethical aspects applies to you. I am shocked at your continuing denials of the existence of this continuously growing virtual mountain of conclusive anti-retraction evidence right before your eyes. I attribute this to deception’s lurking influences everywhere, as Rizal warned at the end of his famous rationalist consciousness-raiser, the still hardly read letter-essay to Philippine women and their men. Those in sociopolitical studies may recognize which famous thinker wrote this often-quoted line: “The ideas of economists, political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed, the world is ruled by little else.” If that’s true in academic, scholarly, and scientific matters, what more in the realms of faith and ideology. Your classrooms’ nationalism apostle, the Rizal who died like a Catholic saint in Jesuit histories and plays fused faith with nationalist ideology once more as the two did in Rizal’s times. It is like Christians turning Jesus into an apostle of Jewish nationalism against Rome, contrary to the tradition of the Paul-influenced Gospels. If Rizal was such a zealous apostle of Philippine nationalism, why did he fight “1896” in his writings and deeds. Why did he famously ‘bad-mouth’ patriotic nationalism in his ideal civilized world of the distant future made possible by science and individual freedoms everywhere? Why did he preach radical self-transformation first, which he called redemption, before serious thought of all other grand aims?

As a belated Asian champion of the Enlightenment’s scientific humanist ideals, Rizal considered Fourth and Third World Philippine culture’s biggest cancer—Margarita Hamada’s books called it character sores of immaturity its Spanish exploiters couldn’t resist—its complex of nurtured dishonesties, dislike of hard serious reading and thinking; lack of disciplined civic-mindedness; a mindset over-dependent on ties to family and patronage; lazy love of quick fixes of faith and superstition while blaming others for one’s faults. Please prove to your presumably admired hero, to your own selves, to your students and their parents that none of this still applies to yourselves. Do not, then, give this open letter the same treatment given to Rizal’s consciousness-raiser of a letter-essay he wrote from London in 1889 to Philippine women (and their men): your lifted scornful eyebrow of disgust for contrary findings. The same treatment you gave my two late 1990s books, and those of other similar-minded scholars I’ll keep citing in this work. Read the committed Catholic ex-priest James Carroll’s “Toward a New Catholic Church” and its call to discard the old traditional faith’s “culture of dishonesty in holy silence”? So much of what his books said, and those of Catholic historian Gary Wills, applies to our discussion here.

As you reread this chapter, and the next one too, if only for your iconic subject’s sake, and as one must complex packages of deep thought, honestly ask your conscience one last deep-going question on the historic harm caused by your retraction-influenced over-nationalistic teachings about Rizal (including his alleged endorsement of state-led protectionism if you like). Ask about the extent by now contributed by your combined ideology to our permanent Third-World lot—or curse. For, as Newsweek reported on January 22, 2010, “The world [especially its bar-raising First] has passed the Philippines by, literally…”

Thank you all,

(Sgd.) Roberto M. Bernardo, author of Opus Dei Book’s Darkened Rizal&Why

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