0.2 Opus dei book's darkened rizal & Why - chapter 2  (Page 9/16)

De Pedro, however, is to be thanked for providing us readers with the Spanish Enlightenment background of the 19 ^th century. You cannot have a full or good understanding of our subject’s mature life, works, mission without that necessary background. In that intellectual and socio-cultural background was he accepted by progress-minded Spanish liberals as a fellow Spanish citizen who shared the same hatred of theocratic organized faith in curtailing basic individual freedoms and scientifically oriented self-transformations. His findings on his iconic subject’s intellectual and moral conversion to rationalism at age 22, if half-baked, can’t be understood without knowledge of its liberal and Masonic Spanish background, a point stressed by other historians like the earlier-quoted Milagros C. Guerrero. Incidentally in view of all this Rizal qualifies as an individual-rights hero of Spain too. Think about it.

And you decide too, readers, if Rizal’s Masonic rationalism did really penetrate through to the bones from philosophic and scientific studies, and readings in Christian-origins. Or, as Dr. De Pedro found from his research: No, it did not. Sudden emotional passions for revenge and reforms drove that incomplete transformation. Interestingly, his dating of when the hero became a freethinker predates Catholic nationalist retractionist Leon Maria Guerrero’s dating of that same event. It’s in the latter’s very influential state-sponsored textbook on the hero. Note how, in effect, government institutions have been conspicuously helping on the side of the ‘retractionists’ and nationalists. Guerrero’s most influential book dates Rizal’s conversion to rationalism by as much as a-year-and-a-half later than De Pedro’s. This search for when Rizal turned into a freethinker, and why he did so, and into what kind of free-thinking rationalism encouraged me to make the same search. I found clues for a still earlier date than De Pedro’s, when the hero was still 21, and not yet 22! That’s also when he in Madrid formally joined Church-condemned and free-thinking Freemasonry. At 25, upon finishing his first novel, he had turned into a full Voltairean freethinker, fully anti-Catholic by virtue of that, but ever maturing that way and fully developing so through continuing studies, writings, reflections, associations with others in learned societies.

He radically transformed himself to become the unique Indio embodiment and champion of Spain’s belated Enlightenment awakening of the 19 ^th century, its Philippine “Morayta and Pi y Margall”. These church-condemned free-thinking Masons played big roles in his nonviolent revolutionary conversion to Masonic scientific humanism’s stress on individual perfectibility under a regime of individual freedoms and church-state separation. I think then, curious readers, that I’ve given you a good advance preview of my entire unfinished “two-stage” book described in the preface and the Table of Contents. This rushed advance version of the first three most important chapters may be considered still in need of general editing, copyediting, proofreading and other assistance in the hostile backdrop of a still superstitiously religious culture that does not care if this work, in whatever shape, saw light of day. One is forced to say, politically incorrectly, that it must be a tragic people who in the 21 ^st century still show no real or strong interest in vindicating their race and peoples’ noblest great son from his otherwise character-assassinating retraction.