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MANY patriotic Filipino Catholics, who, while being nationalist,
also take their faith seriously, love Jose Rizal and his example.
They agree that he should be the foremost national hero. They must,
I suppose, also wish, as I do, that some definitive finding based on
rigorous research and logical analyses, makes it an article of fact,
not merely of faith, accepted by historians, Rizalian scholars and
the National Historical Institute, that our hero indeed died a fully
restored Christian and Roman Catholic.
Did he die a saint because he was in a state of
grace when martyred by the Spanish colonial government after a court
martial found him guilty of crimes he did not commit?
The author of the book, Rizal Through a Glass
Darkly, does not only say Rizal possibly died a saint. A scholar,
Fr. Javier de Pedro, a secular Catholic priest incardinated in the
Opus Dei prelature, who has been a spiritual director of many, many
souls since he was ordained in 1964, states unequivocally: “I am
convinced that he received long ago the welcome of the Father to the
house of Heaven.”
Rizal Through a Glass Darkly is literally a
spiritual biography of Rizal. I have known its author since 1967. He
holds a doctorate in industrial engineering from Barcelona’s
Escuela de Ingenieros Industriales, which enjoys a reputation for
excellence not just in Spain but in the whole of Europe. He also has
a doctorate in Canon Law from the University of Navarre, Pamplona,
Spain.
Many Filipinos today have a cynical attitude
toward the Catholic Church, Christianity and the piety of those who
pray. They will readily pooh-pooh Fr. de Pedro’s book, laughing at
the mere idea of “a spiritual biography.”
Among serious Christians, however, whether
Catholic, Orthodox or Protestant, spiritual biographies are taken
seriously. To the genre of spiritual biography belong important
additions to Church scholarship and historical literature.
Rizal Through a Glass Darkly is a valuable
addition to Philippine historical studies.
Javier de Pedro charts the state of Jose
Rizal’s spiritual life, the progress and detours he made in his
journey to heaven. We see in this book how the hero’s mind worked
about God, religion, the virtues, the Church and the friars, at
every stage of Rizal’s life.
The references Fr. de Pedro used are concrete
works available for all to examine and verify to test the
priest—historian’s correctness, fidelity to the truth,
objectivity and—important to Catholics who abide by the teachings
of the Church—adherence to the sound doctrine. He used Rizal’s
own letters, poems, diaries, essays and the Noli and the Fili. He
also used letters written to Rizal by friends, relatives (including
his mother) and critics alike. Fr. de Pedro also referred to news
items and comments written about Rizal, his trial and his execution
and to the testimonies of Rizal’s teachers, confessors and
defenders, archival documents in Spain as well as the most popular
and well-regarded books that used primary sources about Rizal—by
Jose Arcilla, Austin Coates, Horacio de la Costa, Ambeth Ocampo,
Rafael Palma, Fidel Villaroel, among others.
In giving his readers a profile of Rizal’s
spiritual state through the three decades of his life, Fr. de Pedro
does something no other book has done for us Filipinos who have more
or less studied his life from earlier available biographies and
Rizal-centered histories. Fr. de Pedro’s knowledge of the pastoral
care of souls makes us realize for the first time the torments our
hero must have suffered and the joys his soul must have enjoyed
during events that, in our previous readings and studies, were just
historical happenings that triggered some other actions and events
that changed our country’s fate.
It will spoil the book for you if I go into
detail about the hero’s deepest moral problems. And, Procopio,
please don’t be so shallow as to think these have to do with his
relations with beautiful women.
One of the things I did not know until I read
this book is that, among the things that made Rizal decide that the
frailocracia was the one biggest evil in the Philippines, was his
misunderstanding of a brief message from his elder brother and
mentor Paciano. The message was about an evil deed a Fr. Villafranca
was doing to Rizal’s father. Rizal assumed Paciano’s evildoer to
be a friar, when in fact Villafranca was a secular priest. This old
priest was blackmailing Rizal’s father—threatening to expose the
“dark” family secret (which to us today is something to laugh
about) that Antonino Lopez, the good husband of Rizal’s sister
Narcisa, was in fact the son of Fr. Leoncio Lopez, the parish priest
of Calamba whom Rizal knew to as a great man. Rizal modeled El
Filibusterismo’s Fr. Florentino on Fr. Leoncio.
(Continued on Friday)
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