0.2 Opus dei book's darkened rizal & Why - chapter 2  (Page 35/16)

Chapter 2

OPUS DEI BOOK’S DARKENED RIZAL

Man redeems himself only through profound studies.

──From 1889’s “Science, Virtue, Work in Masonry”

A Story Worth Telling

But not as told by the book, Rizal Through A Glass Darkly. That’s the title of Opus Dei priest-scholar Dr. Javier de Pedro’s major work on the iconic Dr. Rizal, published in 2005 by the country’s Opus Dei-sponsored University of Asia&the Pacific. My own retraction-disrespecting findings from the late 1990s to the present on roughly similar topics differs sharply with Dr. De Pedro’s retraction-believing findings. His is of a darkly driven sham-freethinker Rizal killed by Spain as a rebel for political reasons. My roughly similar research, on he other hand, unearthed a church-and-theocracy killed one for the mainly religious reasons of his church-state separatist heresies. In his otherwise modern character’s core Dr. De Pedro insists, like the Zaides and almost all others, this amazing hero remained Catholic. And considered himself a Catholic somehow. On the contrary my researches yielded a fully Catholicism-hating Voltairean freethinker, a world-heroic Masonic scientific humanist, whom church and its theocracy condemned for it, whose faith killed him as Rizal himself declared in his defiant-tender death poem.

Nothing of the sort, but its reverse, you will read from Dr. De Pedro’s major book on the hero, nor in the retraction-influenced nationalistic textbooks. This greatest Indio, or Indian, that Spain ever met anywhere in its conquests and gave its best education, it killed in 1896 supposedly for Spanish politico-nationalistic reasons. How then could he be Asia’s first champion of the Enlightenment? My research claims Spain’s colonial theocratic church instigated that false charge of anti-Spanish separatism since the late 1880s on the otherwise nonviolent freethinker-reformer Rizal. His theocratic prosecutors suppressed many clear evidences of innocence in his seized diary, finding of innocence by a just-ousted Governor-General, his acceptance as physician in Spain’s Cuban army, his powerful December 1896 letter fighting the rebellion itself, etc. Then its most influential Spanish priests, especially Jesuits, framed him once more with probably world history’s most successful and harmful retraction of beliefs, works, deeds. Summed up this way, Rizal’s life, especially his dramatic last hours, inseparable from his own secret finishing and delivery of his retraction-falsifying death poem, is a riveting story worth telling for he first time. Wait till you finish chapter six before judging this huge claim. I often ask myself: “Why do I seem to be the only one who tells Rizal’s story this way, and even crows about it? A death so fine like this very rarely seen in all the annals of history, philosophy, religion, and even literature. Tragically this is still unknown where reigns the retraction-influenced nationalistic perspectives on his character and chief mission. With costly tragic results as we shall see.