0.2 Opus dei book's darkened rizal & Why - chapter 2  (Page 7/16)

For Dr. De Pedro the famous alleged retraction is proven fact of history, if only because its paper, ink and handwriting together does look real. He gives no conclusive experts’ consensus on its total handwriting’s authenticity. He relies unduly on his side’s favorite Catholic analyst, forsaking all others who disagree. He relies as well on misreadings and misleading half-truths to buttress his claim of authenticity. In my retraction-replacing paradigm of Rizal as the church-and-theocracy-killed scientific humanist (for basic rights and self-transformation first) I disprove the recantation’s authenticity, it resting on top of similar successes by others in what could be called virtual mountain by now of conclusive anti-retraction evidence. The still-reigning nationalistic retraction-believers will laugh me out of court right away for saying this. Yet, how could I in good conscience say the things I’ve been saying here in this paradigm-replacing work without previously having done a disproof (updated here) of the alleged retraction? De Pedro holds two earned doctorate degrees and should be thoroughly versed in scholarly and scientific methods of research and problem-solving, yet he puts it all in the ultimate service of Catholic theology (as Catholic scientist Galileo did ultimately). His painstakingly researched major work took some two decades to research, write, publish from start to finish, a worthy sequel to Vincentian priest-scholar Jesus Maria Cavanna’s monumental efforts of the 1950’s and 1980’s on behalf of the Church. My own excavations and examination of roughly the same voluminous evidence De Pedro examined, plus more that he overlooked or skipped, point unerringly to a bone-deep scientific humanist, a champion of individual freedoms, ideally under church-state separation. And elsewhere in this book-critique I delved into how he rapidly evolved from age 21 on, in liberal Madrid, out of Catholicism into the times’ anti-Catholic humanist Masonry. De Pedro himself described as “total war against the religious establishment” the hero’s first historico-cultural novel. By its finishing date at age 25 he had become fully Voltairean. Fully inspired by Voltairean and Darwinian thought, Rousseau to some extent, and his readings in Real Jesus Studies, his relentless jeremiads and diatribes against the Church in all its aspects in satires and essays showed him to be a fully Catholicism-hating Voltairean. He thus could no longer think of himself as a Catholic but a classical freethinker.

Not one distinctly specific Catholic doctrine or dogma remained intact, including in regard to the Catholic concept of God and salvation through faith. This was how he was viewed too at the time by the friar orders and the Jesuit, who by historical accident escaped lumping by Filipinos into the same pot with the so-called friars. However, his most hated enemy and main concern was (in today’s language) his own Fourth and Third World peoples’ anti-scientific amoral mentality or mindset (seen from the Enlightenment’s ideals). This extended to what he called “the lamentable indolent predisposition”, both in matters physical and intellectual. There was no Machiavellian pretending about his writing in the manner of a fully Voltairean and anti-Catholic freethinker. Although the textbooks don’t say that he primarily fought the Church and its theocratic churchmen and followers, most of his writings did that. He blamed their foreign religion for his peoples’ deeper into superstitious religiosities and stunting, which his writings called brutalization. The Church, its priesthood, other religious and their lay disciples fought back savagely against him and his church-condemned Masonic scientific humanism. The former Jesuit Superior Pastells in his notorious 1897 ‘Rizal y su obra’ admitted they all hounded him out of the country in 1888. He implied that much to Rizal himself in his 1892-93 letters in bitter accusations that his former student had “suffered the great fall from the Catholic Religion and the Spanish Nation and hoisted the flag of subversion [with fellow Masons]…” De Pedro’s book can be regarded sequel o and update of many previous Jesuit efforts at bearing false witness to the image they often called miraculous of a piously retracting Rizal. I’ll flesh out this sketched background above as we get deeper into this cover-up-exposing critique.