0.2 Opus dei book's darkened rizal & Why - chapter 2  (Page 8/16)

Imperfect Partners

To his credit, De Pedro dared to go against the grain and displease the reigning retraction-respecting nationalists who promote the image of a pro-independence Rizal actually supporting the 1896 rebellion. By now let us fully admit the evidence proving the chief Philippine hero’s principled opposition to it, he advised. De Pedro does not fit perfectly into the reigning nationalistic retraction-respecting school of thought that distorts Rizal into a nationalist zealot. For God’s sake, he says in effect, enough already of this ideological nonsense and take him at his own torrent of words and deeds condemning the rebellion of 1896. Let us admit that not all retractionists or retraction-respecters take the partisan nationalistic view of the hero as participant and supporter of that violent revolution, though in his own nonviolent patriotic reformist terms he was as much a revolutionary as anyone else, if not more so. De Pedro is the rare exception to the general rule. My point is that nearly all Philippine pro-rebellion nationalists, who count Rizal as one of them have been Catholic believers or respecters of the Church’s retraction claim, with just the fewest exceptions. Because he seems to have been born, raised and educated in Spain, De Pedro did not bend over backward to misrepresent the chief Philippine hero’s nonviolent nationalism. For all that, Opus Dei priest-scholar De Pedro remains a champion of the still reigning retraction-respecting paradigm, whether tied to the zealous nationalist view or not. I still lump him overall with the still reigning school of thought because he attributes his iconic subject’s death as a framed violent rebel not to the religiously avenging churchmen and their disciples but to Spain itself for political reasons. He shares more important similarities than differences with bearers of the still reigning retraction-respecting nationalistic paradigm. Consign then his Opus Dei book not to the flames, but under the reigning false paradigm’s umbrella.

I might as well go a bit more ahead of our amazing story most of which has never been told before. Filipinos generally don’t have the foggiest idea, as a friend noted online recently, nor seem to care knowing about this, but there has actually been all along a firmly growing virtual mountain of conclusive anti-retraction evidence. Don’t laugh that claim out of court, please, or shout me down until you give it a fair hearing. It is described in the next chapter. I Only faith-influenced Filipinos and Spaniards and other Catholics still looking at Rizal through their faith’s glasses and mindsets cannot see it right in front of their faces, so to say. De Pedro was no exception, no matter how learned he is with two doctorate degrees in tow. So typically biased by faith and ideology is Opus Dei priest-scholar De Pedro that he did not go into his iconic subject’s most explosive anti-Catholic works as evidences of his having fully evolved into bone-deep Masonic scientific humanism. The latter fully consumed him as it did Voltaire. As it did Darwin. In fact, as shown elsewhere in this book-critique, his commitment to skeptical scientific method went deeper than even in the case of modern science’s cofounder, the Catholic scientist Galileo. Like Voltaire and Darwin, Rizal should be considered similarly immune unto death to Hellfire-backed calls to return to the old faith. This belies Dr. De Pedro’s “sham-freethinker thesis”, and also the famous Miguel de Unamuno’s similar claim of a century earlier.