Jose Rizal and the Invention of a National

Literature (Resil Mojares)

In 1880, Jose Rizal, then a nineteen-year old student, won
first prize in a literary contest in Manila
 His winning piece, an allegorical essay entitled El
Consejo de los Dioses, narrates a council of the
gods in Mt. Olympus to determine who, among
Homer, Virgil and Cervantes, is the better write in
terms of art and virtue
 Cervantes is judged the winner for the premium he
places on social reform and the rule of season
 With Cervantes, Rizal says, Truth came back to
occupy its place, announcing a new era to the
world, then corrupted.
 One imagines Rizal saying that the Philippines
itself needed a Cervantes, when he praised the
Spaniard for what he did in a society ruled by the
obscurity of intelligence.
The year, 1880 when Rizal wrote the essay, was also the
year the Propaganda Movement was born
 A movement that emerged with the events of
1872 (the Cavite mutiny and execution of the
priests Jose Burgos, Mariano Gomez and
Jacinto Zamora, the movement waned in the face
of repression but waxed again after 1880 when,
under Marcelo del Pilar, La Propaganda was
launched.
  In the 1880s, however, the propaganda movement
was still largely assimilationalist in its call for
colonial reforms, equal rights and local
autonomy.
 Rizal claimed parity with Spaniards as heir to a
great Western tradition. Even Rizal’s call for social
correction was not radically new since it was
already a theme sounded in the costuumbrista
writings of peninsular and Creole authors in
Manila at the time.
This space was dominated by Spanish and Creole
writers based in Manila a small self-conscious
intellectual elite that had the run of the secular press
and were assured, by reasons of race, of their right to
speak
 Their ambitions were Spanish. They imagined
themselves Spain’s enlightened voice in the
colony and aspired to be recognized as such in the
metropolis itself. But they also cultivated native
disciples who shared their ideas of modernity but
would eventually push these ideas in other political
directions
 The space of literature is not fixed and immutable,
but a site of incessant struggle, innovation and
challenges to authority
 Rizal/ Bonifacio – misrepresent a complex and
dynamic continuum in which ideas can
simultaneously exist and one position is
already prefigured in another.
In 1880, Rizal stood at that point in time when the
country’s literary scene was qualitatively changing
from pre-national to one that would, in the course of
events, become distinctly national in its ambition
 In inventing a national literature, the first move
is that of asserting difference, done typically on
the basis of a claim to a distinct culture, history and
identity.
 To assert difference was to disengage from a
dominant discourse that rendered one voiceless
and invisible, carve out autonomous space and
lay claim to one’s own resources for creative
production.
 It involved claims to a deep native tradition and a
wealth of logical linguistic and cultural
resources.
 Asserting difference was a dominant theme of the
Propaganda
 Rizal had a studious interest in local culture
productions, as shown in his references to folklore,
the pasyon and komedya, and Francisco Balagtas
 Rizal was the first to attempt to write a national
history that would disengage the country from
being treated as a mere appendage to Spain
 Rizal recognized the importance of local
languages as a cultural resource.
  Rizal appreciated that a people’s literature must
be grounded in their own history and store of a
social, psychological, and linguistic resources

For Rizal and his contemporaries to internationalize

was not an option but a necessity
 Colonialism incorporates native subjects into a
world-system and puts them in a position where
they have to engage with an external power.
 They recognized, moreover, that in the work of
nation-creation, they had to begin with the living
reality of a culture already contaminated and
vitalized, by the intrusion of foreign elements.
 A literature that has for its vanguard authors who
were more fluent in attempting to produce an archive
of popular knowledge in the Philippines would
produce, in El Folk-Lore Filipino (1889), a work
filled with Hispanic elements, hybrid and open-
ended.
 Discussing Tagalog poetry, Rizal took an insider
stance in correcting Spanish misinterpretations,
arguing that Tagalog poetry had its own rules of
practice
 Rizal, was also driven by the need to make his
country’s literature comprehensible in the
world. His orientation and methods were Western
and literate when he discusses questions of
syllabication, rhyme, meter and stanza in Tagalog
poetry.
  Rizal knew that a nation’s literature is not just what it
was once but what it has – and can – become. It must
not only demonstrate that it has a past but a
future. Rizal asserted that Tagalog literature is
living and dynamic.
 Rizal pointed to the testimonies of Spaniards
themselves about the natives’ gift not just for
imitation but creative assimilation. He was
clearheaded about the fact that a nation’s literary
capital is built up not just by harnessing the local
but by appropriating the foreign, diverting and
absorbing its best elements in creating the
nation’s literature
 Hence the passion with which Rizal and his
contemporaries devoured foreign literatures and
languages, and engaged in projects of annotation
and translation
Rizal recognized that a country’s literary capital is not
just a collection of texts but a living discourse
 Literature – to borrow the words of Octavio Paz – is
not so much the sum of individual works as the
system of relations between them. It is a field of
affinities and oppositions, intellectual space
where, through the medium of criticism, works
meet and enter into active dialogue with each
other.
 Hence – in the third move in creating a national
literature – Rizal argued that a broad and vital
conversation within the nation must be enable
 through an infrastructure of publishing, literary
societies and academies, and an active community
of writers, critics and readers.
 Rizal knew that a national literature is not created
by a single author but by a strategic discursive
community. In this sense, he spoke frequently of
the need to widen literacy and public education.
 He was interested in making visible a community
of Filipino writers and intellectuals. It was in this
context that he repeatedly urged Filipinos in Europe
not only to buy, read, but critically, the books about
the Philippines but to buy books by Filipinos
He recognized that writing is an excuse in authority,
and in the contest over authority Filipinos must not only
be active participants, they must – particularly in matters
pertaining to their country – exercise command.
 Rizal exercised command when he wrote Noli
me Tangere (1887) and El Filibusterismo (1891).
 Rizal had suggested that his annotations of Morga
traced the lineaments of the country’s past, the Noli
dealt with its present, and the Fili pointed to its
future.
 The first attempt to textualize the imaginary
body of the nation, these novels have rightly been
called the foundational fictions of the Filipino
nation.
What moved Rizal to write a third novel?
 The first reason, he said was to write a novel in
Tagalog, addressing Tagalog readers rather than
Europeans
 Rizal was on his way back to the Philippines, and the
propaganda movement itself was beginning to
shift, away from addressing the Empire towards
speaking to Filipinos themselves.
 Of his third novel, he wrote: If I write it in Spanish,
then the poor Tagalogs to whom the work is
dedicated, will not get to know it, though they may
be the ones who need it most. As it turned out, Rizal
began his third novel in Tagalog but then shifted
to Spanish.
 Rizal’s language shift is not as simple as it seems. To
begin with, even in the Noli and the Fili, Rizal was
addressing – in the form of double address –
Filipinos as much as Europeans and subsequently
the medium of translation would enable his
novels circulation across language.
 He recognized not only that the political moment
called for a more direct form of address to his
people, he appreciated that a national literature
cannot exist that does not speak to the people
in their own language.
 In choosing to write in Tagalog, Rizal could not
quite reconcile the difficulties of internal
translation of rendering European thoughts in
Tagalog
 Judging his skills, now wishing to write in Tagalog
as the friars did, he shifted to Spanish – perhaps
 with the intention of retranslating in Tagalog – and
the he abandoned the novel.
 It is beguiling that what survives of Rizal’s last novel
is not in Tagalog or Spanish, but a bilingual and
hybrid text. Indeed, the problem of language
would persists, long after Rizal, as one of the
central issues in the formation of the national
literature
His second motive, Rizal said was to write a novel in the
modern sense of the word – an artistic and literary
novel. This time he said, I want to sacrifice politics and
everything for art.
 He was reacting, perhaps too peevishly to attacks
against his novels’ polemical excess and
stylistic imperfections. Smarting from the
criticism, he resolved to write a novel more artistic
and literary, distanced from the polemical
imperatives that drove the writing of the Noli and the
Fili
 The comments on these novels by Barrantes, Rizal
and Antonio Luna are interesting for the attention
paid to whether the novels succeeded as
novels, or novels in the European manner
 Rizal faults Barrantes for errors of misreading, in
confusing the views expressed by characters in
the novel with those of the author
 Luna defended Rizal’s work by situating it in the
context of the European novel’s evolution from
classicism to romanticism to realism.
  Luna praised Rizal’s extraordinary realism in
capturing the dynamics of a society’s
development. Rizal, he said, is a modern novelist
who sacrificed incomprehensible beauty to
plain truth in depicting a corrupt, weak society.
 Rizal sought to write for Tagalogs in their own
language, he was acutely conscious – in a case of
double vision – of how he had to contend with the
demands of a foreign form as well as
expectations that transcended the purely local
Rizal’s third motive was to write a novel that would deal
exclusively with the usages, virtues and defects of
the Tagalogs
 He wrote:… this time politics will not occupy much
space in it. Ethics will play the principal role. It
will deal only with the usages and customs of the
Filipinos; there will be only two Spaniards – the
curate and the lieutenant of the civil guard.
 Rizal meant to write of Tagalog society, in its own
terms, integral and autonomous, rather than a
reflex of the colonial encounter.
 Rizal was stymied not only by the problem of
language but the challenge of representing
something that did not quite exist in a form
amenable for treatment as a realist novel instead
of, say, a romance, pastoral or myth
 Rizal, came face to face with the impossibility of
writing a novel outside the present and outside
of history.
 When Rizal abandoned his third novel, he may have
thought that it was a novel to be written in
another time and perhaps by writers other
than himself
 Only when the crime, immorality and prejudice
disappear, he said, when Spain ends the
condition of strife by means of open-hearted and
liberal reforms; finally when all of us have died and
with us our pride, our vanity and our petty passions,
then Spaniards and Filipinos will be able to
judge it with calmness and impartiality without
bias or rancor
 At a time when Rizal’s Noli and Fili have been
monumentalized, it is one of the history’s fine
serendipities that, in the end, Rizal left us a novel
that is unfinished – which is what the national
literature must always be.

Where are we now?

The literature that Rizal and his contemporaries tied to
bring about was vigorously promoted in the work
of state-building that began with the
establishment of the Malolos Republic and
continued under the new conditions created by the U.S.
colonial rule
 In the early twentieth-century, there was wide
interest in the issue of national identity (the
 Filipino soul), and in creating the conditions for a
national literature to flourish
 Nation-formation is a continuing process, and
such a construct as the national literature must
remain unstable and unsettled, for it is when it
is so that it is most open and creative. I do not
think we have unsettled it enough

Rublic Act No. 1425

June 12, 1956
REPUBLIC ACT NO. 1425
AN ACT TO INCLUDE IN THE CURRICULA OF ALL
PUBLIC AND PRIVATE SCHOOLS, COLLEGES AND
UNIVERSITIES COURSES ON THE LIFE, WORKS AND
WRITINGS OF JOSE RIZAL, PARTICULARLY HIS NOVELS
NOLI ME TANGERE AND EL FILIBUSTERISMO,
AUTHORIZING THE PRINTING AND DISTRIBUTION
THEREOF, AND FOR OTHER PURPOSES
WHEREAS, today, more than any other period of our
history, there is a need for a re-dedication to the
ideals of freedom and nationalism for which our
heroes lived and died;
WHEREAS, it is meet that in honoring them, particularly
the national hero and patriot, Jose Rizal, we remember
with special fondness and devotion their lives and
works that have shaped the national character;
WHEREAS, the life, works and writing of Jose Rizal,
particularly his novels Noli Me Tangere and El
Filibusterismo, are a constant and inspiring source of
patriotism with which the minds of the youth, especially
during their formative and decisive years in school,
should be suffused;
WHEREAS, all educational institutions are under the
supervision of, and subject to regulation by the State, and
all schools are enjoined to develop moral character,
personal discipline, civic conscience and to teach the
duties of citizenship; Now, therefore,
SECTION 1. Courses on the life, works and writings of Jose
Rizal, particularly his novel Noli Me Tangere and El
Filibusterismo, shall be included in the curricula of all
schools, colleges and universities, public or
private: Provided, That in the collegiate courses, the
original or unexpurgated editions of the Noli Me
Tangere and El Filibusterismo or their English
translation shall be used as basic texts.
The Board of National Education is hereby authorized
and directed to adopt forthwith measures to implement
and carry out the provisions of this Section, including the
writing and printing of appropriate primers, readers and
textbooks. The Board shall, within sixty (60) days from
the effectivity of this Act, promulgate rules and
regulations, including those of a disciplinary nature, to
carry out and enforce the provisions of this Act. The Board
shall promulgate rules and regulations providing for the
exemption of students for reasons of religious
belief stated in a sworn written statement, from the
requirement of the provision contained in the
second part of the first paragraph of this section;
but not from taking the course provided for in the
first part of said paragraph. Said rules and regulations
shall take effect thirty (30) days after their publication in
the Official Gazette.
SECTION 2. It shall be obligatory on all schools, colleges
and universities to keep in their libraries an adequate
number of copies of the original and unexpurgated
editions of the Noli Me Tangere and El
Filibusterismo, as well as of Rizal’s other works and
biography. The said unexpurgated editions of the Noli
Me Tangere and El Filibusterismo or their translations in
English as well as other writings of Rizal shall be
included in the list of approved books for required
reading in all public or private schools, colleges
and universities.
The Board of National Education shall determine the
adequacy of the number of books, depending upon
the enrollment of the school, college or university.
SECTION 3. The Board of National Education shall cause
the translation of the Noli Me Tangere and El
Filibusterismo, as well as other writings of Jose Rizal into
English, Tagalog and the principal Philippine dialects;
cause them to be printed in cheap, popular editions;
and cause them to be distributed, free of charge, to
persons desiring to read them, through the Purok
organizations and Barrio Councils throughout the
country.
SECTION 4. Nothing in this Act shall be construed as
amendment or repealing section nine hundred
twenty-seven of the Administrative Code, prohibiting
the discussion of religious doctrines by public school
teachers and other person engaged in any public school.
SECTION 5. The sum of three hundred thousand
pesos is hereby authorized to be appropriated out of any
fund not otherwise appropriated in the National Treasury
to carry out the purposes of this Act.
SECTION 6. This Act shall take effect upon its approval.
Approved: June 12, 1956
The Rizal Law and the Catholic Hierarchy
Recto’s next big fight was over the Rizal bill.
 It was his belief that the reading of Rizal’s novels
would strengthen the Filipinism of the youth
and foster patriotism
 Recto was the original author of the bill which
would make Rizal’s Noli Me Tangere and El
Filibusterismo compulsory reading in all universities
and colleges
 Reported out by the committee on education, it
was sponsored by Senator Laurel, committee
chairman.
 The measure immediately ran into determined
opposition from the Catholic hierarchy
spearheaded in the Senate by Senators Decoroso
Rosales, Mariano J. Cuenco, and Francisco
Rodrigo.
 Their argument was that the bill would violate
freedom of conscience and religion
 The Catholic hierarchy even issued a pastoral
letter detailing its objections to the bill and
enjoining Catholics to oppose it.
Rodrigo proposed that the education committee hold a
closed-door conference with the Catholic hierarchy
to search for a solution to the dispute
 Laurel and the other supporters of the bill rejected
the proposal inasmuch as the public hearing had
 already afforded the church the opportunity to be
heard fully
 Recto said that Father Jesus Cavanna of the Paulist
Fathers, who had written the pastoral letter, had
himself testified against the bill during the public
hearing
 A closed-door conference was obviously one of the
means by which the hierarchy hoped to exert
pressure against the bill.
 Lobbies from various Catholic organizations as
well as the clerics themselves were very active in
the Senate throughout the discussion of the Rizal
bill. These clerics many of them foreigners, were
seeking conferences with senators to convince
them to oppose the Rizal bill.
A more organized campaign against the bill was launched
under the auspices of the Catholic Action of Manila.
 Its first activity was a symposium and open forum
in which two announcements were made: first that
the Sentinel, official organ of Philippine Catholic
Action, would henceforth be published daily
instead of weekly, and second, that Filipino
Catholics would be urged to write their
congressmen and senators asking them to kill
the Rizal bill.
 Fr. Jesus Cavanna, introduced as an authority on
Rizal, said that the novels “belong to the past”
and it would be harmful to read them because they
 presented a false picture of conditions in the
country at that time.
 He described the Noli Me Tangere as an attack on
the clergy and said its object was to put to
ridicule the Catholic Faith.
 He alleged that the novel was not really patriotic
because out of 333 pages only 25 contained
patriotic passages while 120 were devoted to
anti-Catholic attacks.
 Jesus Paredes, a radio commentator, declared that
since some parts of the novels had been
declared objectionable matter by the
hierarchy, Catholics had the right to refuse to
read them so as not to endanger their
salvation.
 Narciso Pimentel, Jr., another radio commentator
offered the interesting speculation that the bill was
Recto’s revenge against the Catholic voters
who together with Magsaysay were responsible for
his poor showing in the 1955 senatorial
elections
In a three-hour speech on the Senate floor, he
attacked the hierarchy of the Catholic church for its
pastoral letter.
 He declared that the pastoral letter had been more
severe in its condemnation of the novels than a
committee of Spanish Dominican priests whose
findings had resulted in Rizal’s execution.
 In support of his contention, he brought up the fact
that the pastoral letter had cited 170 passages
from the Noli and 50 from the Fili which it
regarded as attacks on the doctrines and
dogmas of the Catholic church.
 He said he could understand the foreign clergy taking
such a position but he found it difficult to understand
how Filipino bishops who will not be bishops
now were it not for Rizal could adopt such a stand
when Rizal exalted the Filipino clergy in his novels.
 Commenting on the opening paragraph of the
pastoral letter which praised Rizal as our
greatest hero, Recto charged that these laudatory
phrases where being used to hide the real
intentions of the pastoral which is to separate the
people from Rizal.
 When Rodrigo agreed to his appeal to the people
to scrutinize the pastoral letter, Rodrigo said this
would arouse the people to oppose the measure
 Recto retorted that on the contrary the reading of
the hierarchy’s letter should open the eyes of
the people to the real enemies of Rizal and
true nationalism
 In reply to a threat that Catholic schools would
close should the Rizal bill pass, Recto went on
record in favor of the nationalization might be just
the step needed to foster a more vibrant
nationalism among Filipinos.
 Recto was in the thick of the fight his tirades against
the church growing ever more bitter, On May 3, in a
 privilege speech, he recalled that during the days
of Rizal, religious orders dominated the
government
 Reacting to a Philippine News Service report that
Bishop Manuel Yap had warned that legislators
who voted for the Rizal bill would be punished in
the next election, Recto took the floor for the
seventh time to warn against church
interference. He branded Yap as the modern-day
Torquemada
 Finally on May 12, the month-old controversy ended
with the unanimous approval of a substitute
measure authored by Senator Laurel and based
on the proposals of Senator Roseller T. Lim and
Emmanuel Palaez.
 The bill as passed was clearly an accommodation
to the objection of the Catholic hierarchy and
Laurel said as much.
 Though it still provided that the basic texts in the
collegiate courses should be the unexpurgated
editions of the two novels, it was now possible
for students to be exempted from using the
unexpurgated editions on the grounds of religious
belief.
 Opponents of the original Recto version jubilantly
claimed a complete victory. Proponents felt they
had at least gained something.
THE TRIALS OF THE RIZAL BILL
Few legislative measures have elicited as much interest
or provoked as much discussion as Republic Act No.
1425, otherwise known as the Rizal law.
 When it was filed by the Committee on Education on
April 3, 1956, Senate Bill No. 438 was supported
by all but 3 of the members of the Upper House
and seemed, to all appearances, a non-controversial
measure
 But when on April 17, 1956, Senator Jose P.
Laurel, as Chairman of the Committee on
Education, began his sponsorship of the measure,
the rumbles of the gathering storm sounded an
ominous warning. This was to mark the start of the
long-drawn disputations, both enlightened and
acrimonious that would engross and divide the nation
for three tense weeks.
 Original Version at GE 109 2
According to Senator Laurel, the object of the measure
was to disseminate the ideas and ideals of the great
Filipino patriot through the reading of his works,
particularly Noli Me Tangere and El Filibusterismo
 The Catholic elements in and outside Congress,
however, were quick to assail the measure as an
attempt to discredit their to the tenets of their faith,
they particularly challenged the compulsory nature
of the bill as violative of religious freedom.
 Principal basis of their opposition was an
alleged Pastoral Letter which while praising Rizal,
 practically branded his novels as heretical and
impious.
 Debates on Senate Bill No. 438 began on April
23, 1956.
 Senator Laurel was supported by a prestigious
colleague and ardent nationalist, the formidable
Senator Claro M. Recto.
 In the other camp were Senators Mariano J.
Cuenco, Francisco Rodrigo and Decoroso
Rosales, all of them identified as rabid Catholics.

Senator Recto provided his usual brilliance, as a

parliamentarian and his vast erudition in history
and law, including Canon Law.
 The gist of his arguments was that, under the
police power and Art. XIV of the Constitution, it
was competent for the State to require the
reading of Noli Me Tangere and El Filibusterismo in
our public and private schools
 The sole object of the bill, he said was to foster the
better appreciation of Rizal’s times and of the
role he played in combatting Spanish tyranny in
this country.
 Rizal did not pretend to teach religion or
theology when he wrote those books.
  He aimed at inculcating civic consciousness in
the Filipinos, national dignity, personal pride and
patriotism
 References were made by him in the course of his
narration to certain religious practices course of
his narration to certain religious practices in the
Philippines in those days and to conduct and
behavior of erring ministers of the church, it was
because he portrayed faithfully the general
situation in the Philippines as it existed.
 While he criticized and ridiculed the unworthy
behavior of certain ministers of the church, he
made expectations in favor of the worthy ones,
like the Dominican friar, Padre Fernandez, and
the virtuous native priest, Padre Florentino
and the Jesuits in general

On the other hand, Senators Rodrigo, Rosales and Cuenco

derived much support from the Catholic Church itself and
from its hundreds of thousands of adherents throughout
the country.
 Their principal argument was no less impressive, to
with that compulsion to read something against
one’s religious convictions was no different
from a requirement to salute the flag, which
according to the latest decision on the matter by the
U.S. Supreme Court, was an impairment both of
freedom of speech and freedom of religion.
  In addition, they invoked the need for unity, which
they said would be imperiled if the bill were
approved.
 A vast majority of our people are at the same time
Catholics and Filipino citizens. As such, they have
two great loves: their country and their faith.
These two loves are not conflicting loves. They are
more harmonious affections, like the love of a child
for his father and for his mother. This is the basis of
my stand. Let us not create a conflict between
nationalism and religion; between the government
and the church.
The conflict reached the House of Representatives
on April 19, 1956, when Congressman Jacobo Z.
Gonzales introduced House Bill No. 5561, which was
an identical copy of Senate Bill No. 438.
 Debates started on May 9, 1956, following the
report of the Committee on Education, dated May 2,
1956, recommending approval without amendment.
 The discussions also revolved on the
constitutionality and the propriety of the
measure but although proceedings were definitely
livelier and more impassioned here than in the Upper
Chamber, it was the mighty battle in the Senate
that drew more public attention.
Already more, than two weeks had elapsed since the
measure was called on the floor, and the conflict was
becoming increasingly bitter.
  On May 9, 1956, however the controversy took a
new through not quite unexpected turn that stirred
new hope for a final resolution of the issue. This
came about when Senator Laurel, sensing the
futility of further strife on the matter, rose to
propose in his own name an amendment by
substitution
 In my substitute bill, I have not included not only the
Noli and the Fili but all the works and writings of
Rizal and even those written by other people
about him.
 I reword compulsory or compulsion in the
substitute bill that I have filed.
 . I can go no farther and this I say: If Rizal was a hero,
and on that there could be no debate, if Rizal is a
national hero, these books that he was written,
whenever read, must be read in the
unexpurgated, original form. Otherwise, I would
prefer to have this bill defeated, defeated
ignominiously if you wish, but then I shall have
fulfilled my duty.

The new measure was also debated in the Chamber, but

with less heat this time, the discussion centering on the
first paragraph of Section 1 and on the powers of
implementation of the Board of National Education
 Senator Rodrigo suggested the deletion of the
proviso in Section 1, but this change was rejected
by the sponsor.
 Senator Lim then proposed the exemption of the
students from the requirements of the bill, on
certain conditions, and the Senate seemed headed
again for another lengthy disputation.
 As thus amended the substitute bill was on the same
day, May 12, 1956, unanimously approved on
second reading.
 The Senate solution seems acceptable enough, so, on
May 14, 1956, Congressman Tolentino, the brilliant
House Majority Floor Leader, sponsored an
amendment by substitution identical to Senator
Laurel’s substitute bill as amended and approved
on second reading in the Upper House.
 There was spirited resistance from several diehard,
notably Congressman Miguel Cuenco, who insisted
in a scholarly speech that the measure was
unconstitutional,
 Congressman Bengzon, one of the strongest
supporters of the original version, who claimed that the
substitute bill represented a complete triumph of
the Church hierarchy.
 Nevertheless with no less than 51 congressmen
appearing as its co-authors, including the majority
and minority leadership in the Chamber, the
measure was approved on second reading the
same day
Congress was to adjourn since die in a few days and,
since the President had declined to certify to the
necessity of the immediate enactment of the
measure, there was need of complying with the
 constitutional requirement that printed copies
thereof be distributed among the Congressmen
at least three calendar days prior to its final approval
by the House.
 Pressed for time, the Speaker, with the help mainly of
Congressman Gonzales, requested the Bureau of
Printing which handled the printing of the Laurel
substitute bill not to destroy the printing molds
of said bill and ordered enough copied for the
members of the House, changing only the number of
the bill and the Chamber of origin.
 Copies of the measure were distributed in the House
even before the Senate bill was approved on
third reading.
 While the House bill was being discussed on second
reading, the Speaker maneuvered to prevent the
insertion of any amendment to avoid its
reprinting and redistribution.
 The Senate version was accepted in toto,
punctuation marks and all.
 The Speaker refused to adjourn the House until the
bill could be finally approved and, on the very same
day Senate Bill No. 438 was approved on third
reading, with 23 voted in favor.
 House Bill No. 5562 was also approved on third
reading, with 71 votes in favor and sent on the
Senate the same day.
 This bill was passed by the latter Chamber without
amendment, also on May 17, 1956, provided that the
 number of the Senate bill should also appear in the
enrolled copied.
 Malacanang took some time in the consideration of the
measure, June 12, 1956, the bill was signed by
President Ramon Magsaysay and became
Republic Act No. 1425.

The Rizal Bill of 1956 Horacio de la Costa and the

Bishops
 Several drafts of a pastoral letter, written by Horacio
de la Costa for the bishops in 1952, survive. De la
Costa’s Rizal emerges as an outstanding moral
figure whose devotion to the truth made his
novels a source of moral as well as social and
political wisdom for Filipinos. Although subsequent
drafts show he was forced by an unknown
interlocutor to temper this view, he retained an
essentially positive reading of the novels.
 In the face of Recto’s 1956 bill imposing the novels,
however, Abp. Rufino J. Santos commissioned Fr.
Jesus Cavanna to draft a new “Statement.”
Beginning with a few positive paragraphs from De la
Costa, the “Statement” then absolutely condemned
the novels and forbade their reading, a prohibition
that proved quite ineffective. The drafts of De la Costa
show that there was within the Catholic Church a totally
different attitude toward Rizal, whose legacy the church
could embrace.
 Reynaldo Ileto (2010), in a recent essay, has studied
the efforts of the 1950s to create a new vision for
the nation in the wake of independence.
Prominent was the newspaperman Jose Lansang, who
expressed some of his ideas as speechwriter for Pres.
Elpidio Quirino, but, more importantly, was associated
with a number of professors from the University of the
Philippines in envisioning a secular nationalist
program for building the nation.
 In Lansang’s vision what was needed was what Ileto
calls a “new Propaganda Movement” of these
latter-day ilustrados. Parallel to Lansang’s appeal to the
nineteenth century was wartime president Jose P.
Laurel’s Rizalian educational philosophy, it too
envisioning a secular nationalism
 As a foil to Lansang Ileto (ibid., 233) singles out Fr.
Horacio de la Costa, SJ, returned in 1951 to the
Ateneo de Manila with a PhD in history from Harvard
University, as representing “the Catholic position”
toward building the nation.
 Although Ileto makes brief mention of Senate Bill 438 in
1956, introduced by Sen. Claro M. Recto and
sponsored by Laurel, making Rizal’s two novels
compulsory reading in all colleges and universities, he
does not specifically attach Father de la Costa to
the conflict over that bill . But as a matter of fact,
De la Costa would play a contested, but hidden,
role in that controversy.
 It appears that, at the request of a committee of
the bishops, De la Costa had drawn up a draft
pastoral letter on the novels of Rizal “some years”
before 1956, when Recto introduced a bill, sponsored
by Sen. Jose P. Laurel, prescribing their reading in all
public and private schools (Kennally 1956a)
 In fact, the initiative for De la Costa’s work must be
dated late 1951, since on 5 January 1952 Dean Jose
M. Hernandez of the University of the East, who
 had published a book on Rizal in 1950, forwarded to De
la Costa through Sen. Francisco “Soc” Rodrigo nine
pages of passages from Rizal’s Noli me tángere,
supposedly containing attacks on, or praises of, the
church (Hernandez 1952).
 Several drafts of a proposed letter are to be
found among De la Costa’s papers, as his original
was modified in response to criticisms from another
source.
 At first sight, it does not seem to have been Fr. Jesus
Cavanna, CM, who was the principal author of the
1956 “Statement of the Philippine Hierarchy on
the novels of Dr. Jose Rizal Noli me tangere and
El filibusterismo” (Kennally 1956a; Constantino 1971,
244). For the “Statement” is drastically different in
text and in tone from De la Costa’s drafts, even
though it did make some use of his final draft in its
opening paragraphs.
 Nonetheless, it is apparent from the extant drafts that
De la Costa was the principal author and, if the
bishops’ committee had also named Cavanna, it would
be as interlocutor to De la Costa. Presumably the
two men were expected to come to a common text.
Since there are no letters from Father Cavanna
among De la Costa’s papers (Allayban 2010), any
such contribution to De la Costa’s drafts must have
been made in meeting(s) of the two men, with De la
Costa producing a new draft subsequently.
Moreover, the Jesuit vice-provincial was not aware
 of any activity of De la Costa in this matter in
1956 and wrote to him as if the appearance of the
pastoral letter and Cavanna’s principal authorship were
entirely unknown to De la Costa (Kennally 1956a). It is
quite certain then that the modifications made by De la
Costa in his successive drafts were made in 1952,
whoever may have been his interlocutor.
 Among De la Costa’s papers, there are five drafts, all
containing many passages of his original, but with
significant differences at times. All of them are
carbon copies, the originals presumably having been
sent to his critic and/or to the bishops’ committee.
 A is the original draft, twenty typewritten pages.
 B is another copy of A, but with a few handwritten
changes, perhaps made while meeting with his critic.
 These are all taken up into C, which has a
considerable number of further changes. In C the
original texts of the passages quoted in the draft
disappear from the endnotes, replaced by simple
reference notes. C seems to be the definitive draft,
which Father Cavanna, as the principal author of the
bishops’ “Statement,” had at hand when he did the
composition of that letter. For the “Statement” had
quotations that do not appear in A, but do
appear in C.
 D is a drastically shortened version of C, only five
pages, though it incorporates an additional
paragraph not found elsewhere in the drafts or in
 the “Statement.” Perhaps De la Costa was asked for
a shortened version, since it omits all his numerous
quotations from the novels, yet it is later than C. It
was not used, however, by Cavanna, who rather made
use of C.
 E is a copy of C, with the phrases or paragraphs
underlined by De la Costa to indicate the
omissions or changes introduced by the
“Statement” in the five pages of C used in part by
Cavanna as an introduction before launching into the
outright condemnations of the novels.
 Finally, we should note that Cavanna was only the
principal author of the bishops’ final letter, no
doubt supplying all the actual references to Rizal’s
writings, but there are indications that the
bishop(s) themselves may have intervened to
strengthen the condemnatory conclusions of the
letter and the strict prohibition to read the novels
under church law. For reasons which will be seen
below, it is most likely that this intervention came
from Abp. Rufino J. Santos, as noted above.
 It is important therefore to see A, the original draft,
though it is too long to reproduce except in summary,
as presumably manifesting De la Costa’s own
views most clearly. It shows a thorough
knowledge of the two novels, from which he
quotes copiously to establish his insights into
Rizal. The original of these and other quotations in the
text appear in two-and-ahalf pages of endnotes in
 Spanish, French, and Latin. It is clearly the work of a
scholar, and of one who has veneration for Rizal,
whom he sees as having a moral, social, and
political message for Filipinos of the twentieth
century

Propositions of the Draft Letter A

 Rizal, by universal consent, is first among Filipinos
who have distinguished themselves for service to
their country.
 For he possessed to an eminent degree those moral
virtues that make up true patriotism.
 He devoted himself to dispelling the ignorance of
his people, raising their moral standards, and
combating the injustices and inequality under
which they labored.
 His love for his country did not blame all ills on
strangers, but proclaimed that the Filipino people
were also victims of their own vices and defects.
 That is why he could say of the Noli that “no one can
dispute the objectivity of my narrative.”
 His devotion to the truth gave him a clear vision.
No Filipino before or after him has understood so well
or so memorably expressed the moral, political, and
 social principles upon which the peace and prosperity
of our country must be based.
 We must applaud in principle that the writings of
Rizal be more read and even introduced into our
schools.
 Apart from the formal teaching of religion, there is no
more effective means to develop in our youth a
sane and constructive nationalism; the moral
qualities of justice, responsibility, and integrity; and the
civic virtue of subordinating individual ambitions to the
common good.
 Rizal declared he did not intend to attack the
Catholic Church itself, but the abuses in it.
 We must not allow the enemies of the Catholic
Church to tear texts from their context to imply
the opposite.
 Rizal’s statement is borne out by a critical
examination of the novels, according to their
nature as fiction.
 He wrote about fictional crimes of fictional
characters, which had a basis in fact.
 In doing this, Rizal did not attack the Catholic
Church itself; rather he did it a service.
 As to the facts, the church awaits the judgment of
history.
 But since the history of the nineteenth century is
imperfectly known, this induces many to take a
fictional narrative like Rizal’s novels as a
substitute for the facts.
 This is the main danger we foresee in their
indiscriminate and undirected reading, especially
by the young, who are apt to take as literally true
whatever they see in print.
 Young people cannot be expected to make the
distinctions between what the persons in a novel
say in accordance with their character, nor
between what is said ironically and seriously
stated, between the condemnation of an individual
and the condemnation of the organization to
which he belongs.
 Therefore, it is our judgment that, while Rizal’s
novels should be made familiar to our students,
the editions should be accurate translations from
the Spanish text, properly annotated by a
scholar familiar with the ecclesiastical and civil
history of Rizal’s period, and should ordinarily be
commented on and explained by the teacher in
charge.
 There is nothing in the novels that constitutes a
danger to the faith and morals of a mature, well-
instructed Catholic.
 Rather, they contain much that is in conformity with
the Gospel and right reason, and will serve to
 develop in our people a wise and generous love
of their native land
Changes in A Introduced in Draft C
 From these propositions it is obvious that for De la
Costa, as shown in A, Rizal is the national hero
not just because he was executed by the Spaniards,
nor because he analyzed the problems of the nation
with perspicacity, nor because he enunciated
political and social principles for the good of the
nation. He did all these, but he was also a moral
teacher and even a moral example
 In draft C there is a conscious effort to deny to
Rizal the moral role, so prominent in draft A,
and which played so important a part in his life.
 The moral dimension of A is completely omitted
as a reason for honoring Rizal, whether in his
person or in the teaching he imparted.
 Where A had spoken of “the most valuable of
Rizal’s ideas [being] contained in his two
novels,” C hastens to limit those ideas to being
only “in the political and social order.
 When analyzing the novels as such, A had warned
against enemies of the church who by
passages “torn violently from the context” use
them to “discredit the Church in the
Philippines.” This is retained in C.
 Similarly, A takes the passage in which Rizal is
alleged to attack the Catholic doctrine of
Purgatory. Analyzing the passage as a whole, it
finds that Rizal did not intend to take all that is said
there seriously, but rather was “merely using a
common enough literary device, that of making a
character reveal himself instead of describing
him.” Hence “we must seek Rizal’s true meaning by
a dispassionate examination of the works
themselves.”
 C, while retaining the example from Capitan Tiago,
omits the one from Tasio the Philosopher,
apparently unconvinced by the argument that Rizal is
simply using a literary device. There is a single page
in the folder, entitled “Objections against Rizal’s
novels,” apparently written by someone after
reading A. Its few brief paragraphs further support
the need for annotations to the text, and suggest
that actually this would be a good teaching
opportunity for the church. It objects, however,
that: “[the novels] portray the friars as licentious
scamps. The impression given, even to adult
readers, is that these friars are representative of
the Catholic priesthood.”
 Another paragraph has a question about Maria
Clara’s entrance into the monastery. Those are
all the brief comments except for the following, and
none of them lead to modifications to the text
of A. Only the last of its few paragraphs leads to
 change. It says: “the pages treating of Purgatory,
altho [sic] not necessarily Rizal’s are extremely
offensive to Catholics, even to adults.”7 It is clear
that De la Costa took the advice on Purgatory,
and substituted a different brief example, as
appears in C.
 Whoever was the author of this page, he was not
the one responsible for the other changes from
A to C, since he does not treat anything but the
brief points noted, in which only the one on
Purgatory has an effect on C.
 Although the claim of A that the satire on
Purgatory by Tasio was not meant seriously is
dropped, De la Costa rephrases the heart of the
matter by a new insertion where he observes that
“several of Rizal’s characters in the novels are
‘liberal Catholics’ of the type only too common in
the latter part of the nineteenth century, or Catholics
who have lost their faith.” Thus Rizal has them
speak according to their fictional personality.
“Hence, if Tasio the Philosopher questions the
existence of Purgatory, if Don Custodio refuses to
believe in the infallibility of the Pope . . . it may
reasonably be argued that Rizal is merely making
use of the novelist’s right to portray people as
they are.” If the novelist were to suggest that these
errors were his own opinion, “he would be teaching
and not merely portraying error. And as a matter of
 fact, we are able to discover no clear example of
Rizal doing this in either of his two novels”
 Hence C repeats the assertion of A, though
changing “it is evident” to “it seems to Us that
Rizal makes it sufficiently clear” “that what he
wished to attack was not the Catholic Church itself
but the abuses and distortions with which her
unworthy children adulterated the purity of her
principles and practices.” In corroboration, De la
Costa repeats the quotation from Rizal’s letter
to Hidalgo in A to that effect, and concludes, “This
claim is fully confirmed by a careful reading of the
novels themselves.”
 As in A, De la Costa observes that we must not
exaggerate the evils. But where A added “Rizal did
not intend we should,” this is omitted by C, and two
sentences are added to the effect that such social
novels give the impression that the evils they
depict are typical. “A had said that the crimes had
a basis in fact.
 The rest of C follows A except for two practical
matters. To the role of the teacher in A is added
the need for a handbook to explain the text.
Finally, a new paragraph considers it not advisable
that high school students be given the entire
text of the novels. Instead, they should be given
“an abridged edition . . . adapted to these age
levels, [which] contains the essence of Rizal’s
 thought, and yet [will] not be a scandal to young
and tender consciences.”
 The rewritten passages are surely from De la Costa’s
hand, as they blend into the text too neatly to be
simply a critic’s suggestion inserted. But the question
about the substance of the changes remains.
 It is true that some verbal and stylistic changes
may have been De la Costa’s own original idea.
Thus in the third paragraph of A, Rizal’s love of
country is said not to be an “unthinking love,”
which in C is changed to “unreflecting love.” But it
is hard to believe that he could have written A,
clearly done with careful study of the novels as well
as of other sources, and then removed so many key
passages reflecting his estimation of Rizal and his
novels unless he were compelled to do so by an
authorized critic. It is thus extremely likely that the
episcopal commission that asked De la Costa to write
a draft pastoral should have included Cavanna or
some other person to work with him as his
interlocutor.
 This being said, C remains the draft De la Costa
submitted to the episcopal commission in
1952. It does not contain all that he had wished
to say about Rizal and his novels, but, having
apparently accepted that the bishops were not likely
to adopt a pastoral letter which held up Rizal as a
moral exemplar and extolled his moral teachings, De
la Costa apparently contented himself with
 maintaining that the novels did not attack
Catholic teaching if properly understood as
novels and commending—with the proper
caution of an annotated edition—their reading
for those capable of understanding them with the
help of a teacher. He was, after all, not expressing
his own ideas on Rizal and his novels—he had
done that in A—but offering to the bishops who
had commissioned him a statement with which
he could still agree. It did not say all that he
thought of Rizal and his novels, since he had been
compelled to omit much. But it did not deny his
essentially positive view. He himself would not
be the one to sign C, but he could propose it to
them as a still positive appreciation of Rizal and his
novels.
 At this point in 1952 the draft was out of his
hands, and apparently remained in the files of
the episcopal commission for the next four
years. Since De la Costa was out of the country for
some weeks before Recto introduced his bill making
the reading of the novels obligatory in all schools, as
noted above, he did not take any further part in
preparing the statement of the bishops which
appeared on 21 April 1956. He was evidently
dismayed, however, when afterward he saw what
had been done to his draft C in the bishops’
“Statement.” For he underlined in green ink in E
the passages in C which had been altered or
suppressed, and in a printed copy of the
 “Statement” from the Boletin Eclesiastico ([Philippine
Hierarchy] 1956) he underlined the changed
passages. It now remains to see what these
changes were
Changes from Draft C to the Bishops Statement
 The six paragraphs of draft C are taken up as the
introduction to the public letter, giving it an
initially positive approach. There are, however,
phrases or sentences dropped and others
inserted. Examining these omissions and additions,
we find a significant trend, although there are
some minor changes that are relatively
insignificant, or are matters of style. Presumably
this was intended to avoid attracting attention to
the Spanish religious orders.
 More seriously, there appears a conscious effort
not to praise Rizal too highly, even where there is
no question of religious matters.
 Where C had attributed to Rizal “the first place of
honor . . . by universal consent,” he was now given
“the highest” but dropping the “universal
consent”. His “excellent” qualities become simply
“great”. And the last remaining attribution of
“moral virtues” that comprise patriotism is
dropped. His “startlingly prophetic” teachings
become merely “patriotic” Even a quotation from
Rizal’s dedication of the Noli to his country omits his
declaration that he proposes “to describe your
 present state without fear or favor” Finally, the
assertion that “no Filipino before or after him has
understood so well or so memorably expressed the
political and social principles upon which the peace
and prosperity of our beloved country must
necessarily be based” is pointedly omitted, even
though it is the topic sentence of the paragraph that
follows
 Turning from Rizal himself to the novels, there is
evident a desire not to grant too much
importance to them even when not dealing
with religious matters.
 After omitting completely the passage in C from El
filibusterismo, in which Father Florentino gives his
program for the redemption of the country to the
dying Simoun, said by C to contain “the very essence
of the Gospel,” paragraph 5 of the “Statement” ends
its appropriation of C with a drastic distortion
of its original. Repeating C’s first two sentences to
the effect that Rizal intended in the novels to
“expose in terms of fictional narrative the actual evils
which then afflicted Philippine society,” its change of
words entails a quite different view of the novels
 For C that “social cancer” was “in [Rizal’s] opinion,
largely due to the decadent state of the religious
orders and the abuses which had crept into the
practice of the Catholic religion.” With a total
change of meaning, the abuses in the practice of
religion Rizal opposed becomes not abuses but
 “some practices of the Catholic religion,” thus
laying the foundation for the latter part of the letter
in which wholesale condemnations of the novels
would be detailed (ibid.).
 In these two sentences we find the radical
differences between De la Costa and Cavanna.
Where the former finds Rizal castigating
“superstitious observances” (though with
vividness, as he will say later in the draft), Cavanna,
without even admitting the superstitious
observances, finds Rizal rather castigating the
“practices of the Church” themselves. The
“considerable portion” of the novels is changed to
“the larger part,” and the priests are not said to be
“bad” but merely “disedifying.”
 After this paragraph in its mangled form, the
remaining twelve pages of C are dropped in favor
of a wholesale condemnation of the novels.
Within those pages De la Costa had argued that the
novels should be read according to their
character as novels. Hence, if the persons in the
novel are liberal Catholics or have lost their faith, it is
only right that the opinions they express be
taken as what is fitting for such a character to
say, and do not express the teaching of the
author of the novel. He had added that “we are
able to discover no clear example of Rizal doing
this,” that is, “suggest that these are his own
opinions which he proposed to his readers as true” so
 as to be “teaching and not merely portraying error.”
Thus he concludes that no passage may be found
in which Rizal shows that he wishes to attack
the church itself rather than the abuses and
distortions of her teaching.
 This quotation is omitted by Cavanna, but to
counteract its implication he quotes another letter
of Rizal’s Cavanna relates that when Trinidad
Pardo de Tavera defended Rizal to Fr. Federico
Faura from having attacked the church, by
saying that in attacking the friars the stone was
thrown so high and with such force that it reached
religion, Rizal corrected him, saying: “This
comparison is not quite exact; I wished to throw the
missile against the friars; but as they used the
ritual and superstitions of a religion as a
shield, I had to get rid of that shield in order to
wound the enemy that was hiding behind it”
 Cavanna then concludes that Rizal “did attack the
shield, that is, not only the superstitions which
sometimes, due to ignorance, creep into religious
practices, but the ritual itself of the Church, which
are sacred acts of Catholic worship” However,
Cavanna here, not from the original letter, which
was in German, but from its translation in the
Ozaeta version of Palma’s biography of Rizal,
Pride of the Malay Race, thus from a translation of a
translation Moreover, although Ozaeta correctly
translated Palma, the latter had neither
 translated from the German original nor used
the Spanish translation of the Epistolario
Rizalino Although the fifth volume in which this
letter appears was still in press when he completed
the biography in 1938, he must have had an advance
copy of the Spanish translation. However, in spite of
his quotation marks, Palma in fact merely
paraphrases the key passage, and dishonestly
inserts the words “rituals and superstitions,”
which do not occur in either the German or the
Spanish translation.
 It is clear that the word “ritual” nowhere appears
in the quotation, and hence the argument of the
“Statement” is simply false, although its
falsification came from Palma rather than
Cavanna. Nonetheless, the correct passage is
indeed capable of being interpreted to make
the novels an attack on the church. However, it
deserves to be matched with the quotation contained
in C above from the letter to Hidalgo that what
Rizal said he attacked were the abuses. The
quote from the letter to Blumentritt is likewise
capable of being interpreted in the same way as De
la Costa saw it, as an attack on the abuses and
superstitions of the time, not on the church as
such
 Clearly Cavanna chose to interpret it as an
attack on the church itself, even apart from being
deceived by the tendentious translation of Palma-
 Ozaeta. For, in an implicit rejection of the
assertion of C, denying that there was any passage
in the novels where Rizal could be shown to speak in
his own person attacking the church, rather than
having his characters speak as befitted them.
 Cavanna then proceeds to give over 120
references to passages that either “are against
Catholic dogma and morals” or “disparage
divine worship” or “make light of ecclesiastical
discipline.”
 Evidently he has cast his net wide, since one finds
even such items as education in Catholic schools,
processions, stole fees, bells, and other matters on
which even a devout Catholic might have
negative opinions. Thus, in effect, he does not
allow that in any case the offending
statements were intended to portray
characters as they were. Basically he is using a
different principle than De la Costa, and thus comes
to a conclusion totally contradictory to De la
Costa’s. Rather than there being no conclusive
passage in which Rizal attacks the church,
there are more than a hundred of varying
importance. Two men, both familiar with the novels
of Rizal, come to opposite conclusions. The
“Statement” proceeded rather to quote canon law
forbidding certain types of books, under whose
categories it declared the two novels fell. Only with
permission of ecclesiastical authority, “readily
 granted for justifiable reason” to those with
sufficient knowledge of Catholic doctrine, could they
be read This part of the “Statement,” as well as some
of the minor alterations referred to above, may well
not have come from Father Cavanna but from
ecclesiastical authority, in this case Abp. Rufino J.
Santos, president of the administrative council
of the Catholic Welfare Organization over whose
signature the “Statement” would eventually be
published. Cavanna’s analysis of the novels,
however, had laid the foundation for the
prohibition.
 After expressing their veneration for Rizal, the
bishops insisted that, although he wrote the novels
at a time when he was alienated from the Catholic
Church, before his death he retracted whatever
he had written against her. That last will of his
should be inviolable. “Taking into account Rizal’s
last will, we must carry out for him what death
prevented him from doing, namely, the withdrawal of
all his statements against the Catholic faith”
 The idea of selecting “patriotic passages” from
the novels without the students reading them
within their historical context or within the genre
of a novel indicates how different a perspective
from that of De la Costa was behind the
“Statement.” The isolating of “patriotic passages”
probably came from Cavanna, who is alleged to have
said at a symposium on the novels that the Noli “was
 not really patriotic because out of 333 pages only
25 contained patriotic passages while 120 were
devoted to anti-Catholic attacks
 In fairness to Cavanna, however, it should be pointed
out that De la Costa wrote his drafts in 1951–
1952 at a time when no controversy raged and
the bill of Recto and Laurel had not yet been
introduced with its political subtext. The precise
occasion for De la Costa’s work is unknown, apart
from the fact that it was done at the request of a
committee of the bishops. It is likely that it was
not requested for a particular occasion, but was a
cautionary measure, motivated by the controversy
a little over a year earlier concerning the proposal to
publish at government expense for compulsory
reading in public high schools the Palma-Ozaeta
book, Pride of the Malay Race, in which, among other
tendentiously anti-Catholic passages, Rizal’s
retraction of Masonry and return to
Catholicism was denied, and the Jesuit priests
who testified to it were termed frauds.
 On this occasion the hierarchy published a pastoral
letter, dated 6 January 1950, protesting the anti-
Catholic measure, and perhaps foresaw that
similar attempts to use Rizal as a weapon
against the church might be made in the future.
This explanation of the occasion for De la Costa’s
drafts is supported by the fact that, in one of the
same folders containing his drafts of the Rizal letter.
 Here, while conceding that the fact of Rizal’s
retraction might not be proved apodictically, he
deftly showed the lack of basis in Palma’s
arguments against it. De la Costa filed his two
efforts at studying Rizal and his writings in the same
folders.
 Nonetheless, the two approaches to a statement as a
whole are dramatically different. Not only is there a
different concept of how to read a novel, there is also
a different attitude toward Rizal as national hero.
There are, moreover, different concepts of the
monopoly of the Catholic Church as the only
guardian of morality
 Although Cavanna surely wrote the larger part of
the “Statement,” it is probable that the strict
prohibition of the novel, as well as perhaps other
minor elements, came from Archbishop Santos.
As president of the administrative council of the
Catholic Welfare Organization, it was he who issued
the “Statement,” even though it bore no signature.
Santos’s role is indicated in a letter of Sen. “Soc”
Rodrigo to the archbishop, dated the day preceding
the issuance of the “Statement.” Rodrigo had been,
and would be after the “Statement,” the principal
defender of the church’s position in the
Senate, bearing the brunt of Recto’s relentless
and often vicious onslaughts. In his letter Rodrigo
(1956) made “this last appeal regarding my
suggestion . . . that if the Philippine hierarchy will
 issue a Pastoral prohibiting the reading of these two
books, an exception be made as to editions
which contain annotations approved by the
Church
 Moreover, Santos’s communications on the novels
had not yet ended. The “Statement” originally
contained no signatory; merely its title
attributing it to the Philippine hierarchy. This
led to considerable confusion when the
“Statement” appeared. Recto, among others,
questioned whether the “Statement” really came
from the whole Philippine hierarchy, while
simultaneously denouncing it as a repudiation of
Rizal. No doubt in an effort to establish its
authenticity, Rodrigo apparently approached
Archbishop Santos for a clarification. He
received it, but perhaps had not anticipated all that it
would contain. The archbishop declared that the
“Statement” on the novels “is fully authorized and
approved by all members of said hierarchy.”
(This declaration is still ambiguous. In fact, it is
improbable that, in the days preceding fax, the
“Statement” could have been drawn up with all its
details of condemnable passages, approved by the
archbishop, and sent to the provinces for a return
approval in the time between the introduction of the
Recto bill on 4 April and the appearance of the
“Statement” on 21 April. One must believe that
the “approval” of the bishops was simply a generic
prior authorization of a statement to be approved
 by Archbishop Santos as president. It could then be
said in some sense to have been approved by the
entire hierarchy, even though it was approved
specifically only by Santos. Thus in the subsequent
editions of his book, Rizal’s Unfading Glory, Cavanna,
who was in a position to know, simply put down
Santos’s name as signatory.)
 However, the archbishop went on to say, in a
statement directed to those of his archdiocese, not
merely that the novels were forbidden by the
church. Rather, he emphasized, “without due
permission, it is a sin for any Catholic to read
these novels in their entirety, or to keep, publish,
sell, translate, or communicate the same to others in
any form”. This may have caused apprehension
among booksellers and librarians especially, but it
was too extreme to be effective for most people. In
fact, Rodrigo would later say in a private
communication to the bishops that, as a result, the
novels “sold like hotcakes”
 The senators soon after worked out a compromise,
by which a student who would “serve written notice
under oath, to the head of the college or university
that the reading and study of the . . . unexpurgated
edition is contrary to his religion or religious beliefs,
said student shall be exempt from using the said
edition”.
 Although Acosta considered that this was “a victory
for the local Catholic Church,” it was in fact a
 face-saving compromise, which enabled it to
receive the unanimous vote of the Senate, and
the signature of Pres. Ramon Magsaysay.
 Professors who have taught the Rizal course can
testify that no student has ever come with such
an affidavit. Nor did people conceive it to be a
sin to read the novels.
 Even devout Catholics saw no possibility of following
the “Statement” and its “clarification” by Archbishop
Santos, when faced with a contrary civil law. Indeed,
many no doubt shared, in a less erudite way, De la
Costa’s evaluation of the novels. Although in
retrospect one may perhaps question the practicality
of preparing an annotated edition of the novels, a
statement such as De la Costa had prepared would
have enlightened and satisfied those who
cared. Under the term of Archbishop Santos there
was not much more tolerance for taking a
benign view of Rizal and his novels than under
the Spanish civil and religious authorities of the late
nineteenth century. Although De la Costa’s role in the
“new Propaganda Movement” was not over by
any means, it would be in other fields that he would
be active, particularly in expounding the social
justice teaching of the Catholic Church, and in
refuting the alternative Communist program
Notes
 This and the other personal documents used in
this article, as well as the drafts of De la Costa,
are contained in two folders from De la Costa’s
papers in my possession, marked “Rizal, Noli and
Fili,” which will be deposited with the rest of his
papers in the Ateneo de Manila University Archives.
 The identity of “Joe” who signs the letter is
established by the letterhead of the College of
Liberal Arts, University of the East, where
Hernandez was dean. The numerous quotations
also show that the writer was thoroughly familiar
with the Noli, as Hernandez was from writing his
book on Rizal. Apparently De la Costa, who had just
recently arrived back in Manila from having been
abroad in studies since 1945, was not personally
acquainted with Hernandez, while Rodrigo and
Hernandez were well acquainted from their
active participation in the Catholic Action of the
Philippines.
 The book was Rizal’s Unfading Glory: A Documentary
History of the Conversion of Dr. Jose Rizal (Cavanna
1952/1983). I met Father Cavanna in early 1951 after
a symposium on Rizal in which I took part, and he
had been working on his book for some time
prior to that.
 Kennally’s letter (1956a) speaks of having received
De la Costa’s letter of 3 April 1956, in which he
had sent Kennally a progress report on his work in
the United States. He must have been there at least
 from early March to have thought it necessary to
send a progress report at this time.
 At the Second Vatican Council, 1962–1965, Santos
was a member of the irreducible negative minority in
the face of the progressive direction of the Council,
and only with well-known reluctance allowed its
practical decrees to be implemented in his
archdiocese after he returned from Rome.
 See Schumacher 1973, 75 n. 2. 7 It is possible that
this critic was Fr. Clarence Martin, a member of
the Ateneo de Manila Jesuit community. For after the
bishops’ letter was published in 1956, Kennally
looked for a copy of De la Costa’s final draft, to
contrast it with the published letter, and located one
with Martin (Kennally 1956b).
 C’s phrase “the decadent state of the religious
orders” is changed to “the decadent state of the
religious order” Although this change of spelling
entails a change in meaning, and could be seen as
consonant with other changes mentioned here, it
probably is simply a misprint, since the
document abounds in such.
 This is probably the origin of Father Cavanna’s
book, published in 1957, Rizal and the Philippines
of His Days.
 This was not a draft pastoral letter, but an analysis
of the two chapters dealing with the retraction
in the Palma-Ozaeta book. Neither does it appear
 in his bibliography of published works, so it was
probably meant for some members of the Knights of
Columbus who were involved in the controversy
before the bishops wrote their “Joint Statement.”
 Likewise in one of those folders is a letter of 27 Feb.
1953, from Fr. Leo A. Cullum, SJ, editor of the new
journal, Philippine Studies, rejecting an article of De
la Costa, embarrassedly, because De la Costa was
associate editor of the journal. From the context, it
appears that the article presented unpublished
letter(s) of Rizal to Fr. Pablo Pastells, SJ. The editor
saw them as “a suave and brilliant presentation of
rationalism.” Since there was no possibility of
refuting the arguments paragraph by paragraph, he
judged it impossible to print them. De la Costa had
obtained the letters, missing from the Epistolario
Rizalino, from the Jesuit archives in Spain. As Cullum
(1953) says, “you would not have sent the article if
you agreed with me.” The letters would finally be
published from De la Costa’s microfilms after his
death by Raul J. Bonoan, SJ (1994) in his book, The
Rizal-Pastells Correspondence. It seems clear that De
la Costa was much occupied with Rizal in the years
1949–1952, although he was in doctoral studies at
Harvard University till 1951, and then in Europe for
much of the following year, microfilming Philippine
documents.
 The only other senators who opposed the bill were
Decoroso Rosales, brother of Abp. Julio Rosales of
 Cebu, and Mariano Cuenco, brother of Abp. Jose Ma.
Cuenco of Jaro.
 The number of passages condemning the novels
alleged by Recto was a gross exaggeration. We have
given the correct, sufficiently large, number above.
 However, Abp. Gabriel Reyes, then archbishop of
Manila and administrator of Cebu, had earlier issued
a similarly drastic prohibition of Palma’s Biografía de
Rizal for his jurisdictions (Ocampo 2000, 9). This was
different from the 1949 statement of the whole
hierarchy, which merely protested against the Ozaeta
translation being printed at government expense and
imposed as reading in the schools.
 It has been impossible to find anything concerning
the Rizal bill in the archdiocesan archives. The
archivist, Fr. Albert Flores, searched for me any
reference to the controversy, but without success. He
informed me that there is a large gap in the archives
for much of the term of Cardinal Santos (Flores
2011a, 2011b).
INTRODUCTION TO RIZAL
In the mid-1950s, nearly sixty years after his execution
and seventy years after the publication of Noli me
tangere, Jose Rizal became the subject of a political
controversy that pitted the Philippine state against
the Roman Catholic church over the issue of including
the national hero’s life and works in the curricula of public
and private schools, colleges and universities.
 The eventual compromise, Republic Act No. 1425
(Rizal Bill), was a piece of landmark legislation
that brought literature and nationalism
together in the state’s attempt to decolonize the
culture of the Philippines: the bill was an
important example of the state’s effort to use
literature to foster national consciousness
among the Filipino people and make good citizens of
the Filipino youth
 By singing out Rizal’s two novels as a constant and
inspiring source of patriotism with which the
minds of the youth especially during their
formative years, should be suffused, the Rizal
Bill attested to the existence of a disciplinary
space, an ensemble of discourses and practices
 constituting the field of literary education over which
the Philippine state sought continually to extend the
scope of its nation-building projects
 The Rizal Bill laid down a set of instructions on
how to read the two novels. Rizal’s novels were
described as a constant and inspiring source of
patriotism which must be read in their original
or unexpurgated editions or their English
translation.
 The Bill accorded Rizal and his novels a central
piece in the state’s nationalist project and
recognition of their vital role in enabling
Filipinos to grasp the ideals of freedom and
nationalism.
 The bill suggested that the heroes especially Rizal
and his novels, originally represented, embodied,
the nationalist ideals of virtue, patriotism and
self-sacrifice.
 The bill made the act of reading literature an act
of discovering the nation’s origins in ideals
embodied by the life and works of the nation’s
heroes.
 The bill held that present and future generations
of Filipinos could remake the national
character. Filipino culture that was fixed yet flexible,
historical yet history-making had the advantage of
being attuned to social and historical
processes, to development and change.
 Nation is the most widespread and significant
political phenomenon of the modern age, and
 that specific cultures are embodied and
particularized as nations, each endowed with
its own national character.
Literature came to occupy a mediating position
between the universal ideals of freedom and
nationalism, and their realization within a
specifically Philippine context.
 Literature had assumed a mediating function
precisely because Rizal’s novels served as
artifactual concrete examples of a Filipino
culture that was conceived as the sum total of all
the products of a society’s creative labor and
aspirations. These works were the means by
which other Filipinos could acquire, preserve
and reshape such a culture.
 The relationship between literature and
Philippine nationalism was cemented through the
paradoxical notion that literary works both
embodied culture and helped create that
culture. This literary paradox was an important
wellspring of the state’s nation building
project.
 The state claimed a role in the nationalist
project of preserving and developing Philippine
culture. By making reading the subject of
supervision, the state arrogated to itself the role of
mediator, the main conduit in the transmission
of ideals from their abstracted sources in the nation.
 It imputed the nation’s origin and its own
justification for existence as a state, to the
writing of nationalism.
 Rizal Bill established nationalism’s origins in
literature at the same moment that it claimed to
regulate literature in the name of the nation.
 The law inaugurated was therefore not a single
reading, but constant reading, a history of
certain kinds of reading.
 The bill’s concession to the external interests
the Church represented was solid evidence of the
fact that the law far from being neutral was
engendered from competing antagonistic
interests.
 The move to institutionalize the reading of Rizal, in
fact, quickly became an arena where the newly
independent Philippine state attempted to
intervene in, and shape public debate over the
nation’s status and meaning in the face of the
visible presence and power of the Church in
Filipino politics; in the face of continued
American influence on Philippine economic,
international and domestic policies; in the face of the
still vivid memories of the direct challenges posed by
the popular nationalism of the Huk movement.
 The Rizal Bill was the legal handmaiden of a
Philippine state that sought to regulate
education to accomplish its declared task of
developing moral character, personal
 discipline, civic conscience and teach the
duties of citizenship.
 The bill was the logical outcome of an apparent
paradox that underlay and continues to inform,
literary production in the Philippines:
Literature has no place in Philippine everyday
life and culture, since few Filipinos read it; yet
literature was invested with a great deal of social,
indeed subversive, significance since it is viewed and
taught in the schools, as a document of the
achievements developments and transformation of
Philippine society, culture and nation.
 Literature’s radical potential is premised on the
ability of literary works to offer new insights into a
given society, on the power of literature to
illuminate a set of issues or questions central
to Filipino people’s experience.
Filipino lawmakers had to confront the danger
inherent in reading Rizal. This danger lay in two
things: to be read meant being read unavoidably in
different ways: and different ways of reading are
ideological, therefore political.
 The debate over Rizal’s readability arose from
the Church’s insistence that Rizal’s satirical jabs
at friar abuses, simony, Purgatory and other
practices and beliefs were the rantings of a
heretic. One of the ways in which advocates of the
Rizal Bill managed to curtail this attack was by
 arguing that Rizal’s novel belonged to the past,
and spoke essentially about the past.
 No man, reading the novels of Rizal, would confuse
the humble missionary laboring among the heathen
or comforting the leapers with the degenerate friars
of Rizal’s time (Locsin).
 These remarks were intended to neutralize the
more upsetting strands of though in Rizal’s
novels and locate the real Filipino outside the
ambit of criticism and satire, which are now
reserved for degenerate foreigners and former
colonizers.
 The evils that Rizal denounced exist very much
to this day, though it may be in a modified
form, and those countrymen of his who set such a
high premium on their animal comforts are very
much alive and with us today, together with their
alien masters still as bigoted and intolerant as of old.
The idea here was to underscore continued
foreign domination, in however modified a form,
and its threat to national sovereignty,
The controversy over how to read Rizal points up the
salient but problematic coupling of literature and
nationalism because it discloses the antinomies of
the national attempt to memorialize and at the
same time engage with Rizal and his works.
 Rizal bill only testifies to the impossibility of
memorializing the beginning of a Philippine
 nationalism that, like the writing of nationalism,
is haunted by Philippine history
Long-standing affinity between literature and nationalism
on the basis of a common fund of ideas and concerns
dealing with the possibility and necessity of social
change
 The intimate connection between literature and
nationalism through the notion of excess, a term
that is used to refer to the heterogenous
elements that inform but also exceed
nationalist attempts to grasp, intellectually and
politically, the complex realities at work in
Philippine society.
 The importance Philippine nationalism accorded to
literature and vice versa, is found on two
presuppositions: the capacity of literature to
represent history truthfully, and the capacity
of literature to intervene in history.
 The excess is the condition of possibility of
both literature and politics because no writing
or political program can exhaust the possibilities of
the social reality is seeks to engage.
 Instead these excesses are a constitutive
feature of nation making, an irreducible
component of the nationalist project of
making community
 The term excess, therefore does not simply refer
to the contradictions or ambivalences at the
heart of nationalist discourse. Rather these
 conceptual failures, point to irreducible
claims exercised on us by our history and our
implication in a world, both of our making and not
of our making
 The concept of excess has important
implications for literary production, not least
because for a country that has lived through years
of colonialism, formal independence makes the
question of social transformation a real theoretical
and practical problem.
Two things can be said about the way in which the
question of social transformation has been
understood in the Philippines.
 First: the question is usually conceived in terms of
a specific ordering of the relationship between
truth and action. The imperative for social
change is often posed as a problem of
nationalist consciousness, that is, it posits a
nation that can be actualized by a subject
whose capacity to transform her society is
informed by her knowledge of her country’s true
history, condition and course of development.
 Second: social change is premised on
powerful norms of freedom, self-determination
and development, most often encapsulated in
the pedagogical associations surrounding the
term culture.
  These two interrelated ways of conceiving of
political agency are fairly common motifs in
nationalist discourses.
 Anticolonial nationalist literature, yokes
together two powerful imperatives – the
imperative to truth and the imperative to
action.
 The relationship between literature and
history is from the beginning more than just a
matter of congruence – theirs is a mutually
determining relation, one taking shape in
and through the other.
Rizal’s novels are considered the founding work and a
significant departure from the mode of literary
production and reception hitherto obtaining in the
Philippines.
 The longest shadow is no doubt cast by Jose
Rizal, whose two novels, required reading in every
high school and college in the country, occupy a
privileged position in the popular imagination
as the progenitors of modern Philippine
nationalism and literature.
 The importance of these writers’ works though, does
not even rest on their canonical status but on their
ability to illuminate, even define, some of the
central concerns and motifs of the so-called
Philippine literary tradition – among them the
commingling of literature, history and nationalism;
the need for transforming consciousness and society;
 and the truthful, realistic depiction of Philippine
society.
 The idea that literature is necessarily shaped by
social processes and has a social function is as
truistic as it is examined.
 Literature is deployed in the field of public and
private education for the formation of a Filipino
subject whose ability to act in, and transform, her
society is dependent on her acquisition of knowledge
pertaining to her nation’s history, present condition
and future course of development.
One of the central issues in Philippine literature has been
the question of whether literary texts, their
producers and their consumers are able to fulfill
the practical social function of rewriting Philippine
history by transforming collective consciousness and
spurring political action aimed at social change.
 The notion of literature’s role in representing and
making history draws in its main impulse and
rhetorical charge from the foundational premise of
nationalism, which builds on a grand narrative of
moral development to posit a self-determining
subject of history.
 Subsequent generations of scholars have used Rizal
and his novel to address Rizal’s fictional
delineation of a Filipino knowable community
that became the conceptual basis of the Filipino
nation.
 Critical reception of the Noli, both in Rizal’s time
and beyond principally concerns itself with the
problem of appropriating a modern that is seen
as having a foreign and external provenance.
 Rizal’s novels, by deliberately destabilizing the
distinction between the real and fictional
between literature and history, provided the basis
for an influential formulation of the knowable
community as an indispensable component, both
the means and ends of radical political imagination
and transformation
 Rizal’s narrative project of rendering the Filipino
national community knowable was also unstable
and tentative, largely because Rizal’s literary
project of depicting – representing – the people who
inhabit the Philippines compelled the recognition that
writing about the Philippines always meant writing
from a position.
 That is, the idea of writing from a specific social
location necessarily implied the existence of other
competing knowledge and perspectives.
 The existence of heterogeneous perspectives,
embodied by individuals and groups of people, could
not be fully recuperated by the universalist
rhetoric of development and freedom that Rizal
invoked in his depiction of Philippine conditions and
in his call for action and self-sacrifice
 Rizal’s novels are a kind of master-narrative
within or against which modern Philippine fiction
attempted to work through a set of unresolved
 issues relating to the problem of truth and action
in a society that was split into different,
contending groups for who independence had
always been a tendentious issue.
The Long Road To RA 1425 (Video)
- Claro M Recto went to many struggles before his
bill was passed to become a law
- He was pitted against the Catholic priests when
it comes to reading the unexporiated or unedited
version of Noli and El Fili
- The clerics believed that the novels were not
patriotic for the reason that out of the 333 pages
of Noli, only 25 were patriotic, 120 were anti-
Catholic attacks
- Claro in a privileged speech challenged them by
saying that is this a new attempt to deliver the
state to the church?
- Americans introduced the separation of the
church and the government
- It was in this context that Recto stood against the
influence of clerics
- May 12, 1956, a new substitute measure by
authored by Sen. Jose P, Laurel. Senator Rusell
Lim and Emmanuel Palaez, as accommodation
to the objections of the hierarchy of the
Catholic church
 - June 12, 1956, the bill was signed to a law,
- RA 1425 is the example of the state’s effort to use
literature to foster national consciousness
among the Filipino people and make good citizens
if the Youth according to Constantino
- Rizal and his novels were given an essential role in
the country’s nationalistic project, it is a
recognition of his vital role of results work in
enabling the Filipinos to grasp the ideals of
freedom and nationalism
- Heroes like Rizal, embodied the nationalist ideals
of virtue, patriotism and self -sacrifice
- Claro, the author of the bill believed that the
readings would strengthen would strengthen
the Filipinism and foster patriotism
- Jose P. Laurel affirmed that Jose Rizal is the
founder of the Filipino nationality and architect
of the Filipino nation
What are the aims
- To recognize the relevance of Rizal’s ideas,
thoughts, teachings and life values to present
condition and apply them as solution to day-to-day
situations
- Develop an understanding of appreciation of
the qualities, behavior and character as well as
thoughts and ideas of Rizal to foster the
 development of moral character and personal
discipline, citizenship and vocational efficiency
- Comply with the patriotic objectives of the
Rizal law asset by the late senator Jose P. Laurel

The Study of Rizal

Historical – Conscious of historical conditions and
circumstances that made him a hero
Critical – Admit at what point that hero’s applicability
ceases to be of current values
The Rizal Law and Its Patriotic Objectives
CLARO M. RECTO (Author)
June 12, 1956 (Law was signed by President Ramon
Magsaysay
August 16,1956 (Law was made effective.)
 Rizal course as a requirement for graduation (All
degrees in Tertiary Education)
 Teaching of life works and writings of Dr. Jose Rizal
 Discussion of Noli Mi Tangere and El Filibusterismo.
Aims:
  Recognize the relevance of Rizal’s ideas, thoughts,
teachings and life values to present condition and
apply them in the solution to day to day situation.
 Develop understanding and appreciation of the
qualities, behaviour, character, thoughts and ideas of
Rizal to foster the development of moral character,
personal discipline, citizenship and vocational
efficiency.
 Comply with the patriotic objectives of the Rizal law
as set by the late Senator Jose P. Laurel.
“Rizal was the founder of the Filipino Nationality. He was
the architect of the Filipino Nation.” - Jose P. Laurel on RA
1425
The State of the Philippines: Background on Jose
Rizal's Nationalism
Jose Rizal is recognized as the most prestigious and
dedicated nineteenth century Filipino Nationalist.
Austin Coates, in his biography of Rizal, suggests
that Rizal was responsible for awakening Asia to
the concept of Nationalism: "Rizal wrote poems and
many articles - all showing his love of country, his
patriotism, and his love of parents, his happiness, and his
sorrows."
During his youth Rizal wrote a letter to a close
friend, Ferdinand Blumentritt, in which he discussed
the need for the young Filipino patriots to promote
local nationalism.
"Our youth should not devote themselves to love
or to the static speculative sciences as do the
youth of fortunate nations.
All of us have to sacrifice something on the altar of
politics though we might not wish to do so."
Rizal further wrote:
"I have always loved my poor country, and I am
sure that I shall love her until death.
I shall die blessing her and desiring the dawn of
her redemption."

The meaning and importance of a man's task can be best

understood and appreciated when viewed within a time
frame and in its proper historical context. To better
understand and appreciate the role of Jose Rizal in the
making of the Filipino nation, one has to know the
developments in the century when he lived, the period
when he worked.

Hard to Imagine by Benedict Anderson

In the difficult late 1950s, the domestic controllers of the
Philippine state began preparations for an elaborate
centennial celebration of the birth of Dr. Jose Rizal
on June 19, 1861
 Noli Me Tangere (published in Berlin in 1887) and El
Filibusterismo (published in Ghent in 1891), are the
chefs d’oeuvre of Philippine literature and had a
central role in the awakening of Filipino
nationalism
 The First Filipino had composed these works in
Spanish, the lingua franca and language of
cultivation of the late Spanish colonial period.
 By the 1950s, Rizal’s two novels had become
inaccessible in their original form. English
translations did exist, but these had been composed,
some even by foreigners in the colonial era
 It therefore seemed only appropriate, in the era of
independence, to sponsor, as the climax of the
centennial celebrations a prize competition for the
best new translation
 In reprisal for what they regarded as bigoted
intervention in the nation’s electoral processes by
certain senior members of the ultra-
conservative Catholic hierarchy, a group of
senators and congressmen sponsored a bill making
the reading of Rizal’s two novels required for all
students whether in state or private schools.
 The church was in a difficult spot. The chief villains
of both novels are clerics: brutal Franciscans,
lascivious Dominicans, power hungry Jesuits.
Both texts contain brilliant pages mercilessly
satirizing the benighted medievalism of
 nineteenth-century Church thinking and
pastoral practice.
 While the Hierarchy was quite happy to
commemorate Rizal as a national hero, indeed
claimed that he had recanted all his Masonic and
deist views on the eve of his execution, it was
strongly opposed to parish-school students reading
much of what the great man had written
 Various political comedies ensued, the outcome of
which was a tactical victory and a strategic
defeat for the Church. Students were not
required to read these two particular texts;
others, less inflammatory might be substituted.
 But the Hierarchy was put, as its adversaries
intended, in the embarrassing position of appearing
to censor the First Filipino.

Among those stimulated by the competition to undertake

a new translation was Leon Ma. Guerrero (1915-82), at
that time the Philippine Ambassador to the Court of
St. James. His fluent translations were very successful
and quickly supplanted all older versions in high-
school and university libraries.
 As Doreen Fernandez noted, they have become
the only translations anybody reads now.
Today’s young and middle-aged Filipinos who have
 actually read the novels in American have read them
in Guerrero’s version.
 Guerrero’s version was systematically distorted in
the most interesting ways. They were caused mainly
by a fundamental change in nationalist
consciousness between the 1890s and the 1950s,
and also by the halting rise in Manila, after
independence, of official nationalism
 He began describing his translation as an attempt to
make the novel palatable to a new generation of
English-speaking Filipinos and give it, beyond
them a wider audience among other English-
speaking peoples on the centenary of Rizal’s birth
 In his own version, he averred, he had tried to give
the reader the ease of original composition, the
Noli as Rizal might have written it if he had been
writing in English for the present generation of
Filipinos.
 The national hero’s novel is to be made palatable
to a younger generation of Filipinos who no
longer have any idea of the customs of their
forefathers – seventy years back
 It will be rendered as if Rizal were writing in the
1950s for Guerrero’s contemporaries. It will be
paraphrased to prevent sophisticated sniggers,
even if it means disappointing generations of Filipino
sentimentalists.
  Bowdlerization and modernization are one is
told, the necessary nationalist means for keeping
Rizal alive for Filipino youth and preserving his glory
from Anglo-Saxon mirth.
DEMODERNIZATION
- It is characteristic or Rizal’s bravura style that
although the story of the Noli is set in the recent
past, and this the dominant tense is the past, there
are frequent glissando modulations into the
present. Yet, every such present was
systematically turned by Guerrero into the past
- In every instance the effect of Guerrero’s alterations
is not at all to update Rizal’s novel but rather to
push it deep into an antique past.
- It is as if he wished to reassure himself that God no
longer fondly multiplies parasites and spongers in
Manila and has finally become no less demanding of
justice than is humanity
EXCLUSION OF THE READER
- Throughout the novel Rizal regularly turns and
speaks to the reader. As if author and reader were
ghosts or angels, they penetrate invisibly, at the
author’s gleeful invitation, into monkish cells, ladies’
boudoirs and the Governor-General’s palace, to
eavesdrop together on what is there transpiring
- This technique sets time aside and sucks the
reader deep into the narrative, engaging her
 emotions, teasing her curiosity and offering her
malicious voyeuristic pleasures
- A simple example is the transition between a scene
where Father Damaso pushes Don Santiago into the
latter’s study for a secret confabulation and the
following scene which features some lively scheming
between two Dominicans.
- At a stroke of Rizal’s wittingly insinuating voice is
muffled, a silent wall is set up between author
and reader, and once again, everything urgent
and contemporary in the text is dusted away
into History
- It is surely not simply that Guerrero probably felt
uncomfortable with the prospect that even in an
independent Philippines the inhabitants might still be
classified and valued by their shells
EXCISION OF TAGALOG
- Rizal’s Spanish text is bejeweled with Tagalog
words and expressions.
- Sometimes they are deployed for sheer comic
effect, sometimes to deepen the reader’s sense
of the conflicts between peninsular Spaniards,
creoles and mestizos and indios
- But most often they simply reflect, as did the
Anglo-Indian that developed in Victorian times, the
causal penetration of the imperial vernacular by local
languages.
 - Bata is the Tagalog word for a child of either
sex, but here clearly means boy. Guerrero
translated this as: Any schoolboy knows as much, as
if Rizal had written muchacho rather than bata.
- Tagalog words such as salakot, paragos or sinigang,
far from being kept in their original form were
rendered, as if from the Spanish, as native straw hat,
crude lamp, native sled, and native dish.
- Tagalog exclamations naku, aba, and susmariosep
– with which almost all the characters lace their
Spanish conversations – were summarily
eliminated.
- This translation stance is especially strange in that
one can hardly imagine even the most
Americanize Filipinos of the early 1960s speaking
of each other of native hats and native dishes
- Most inhabitants of Manila were by then familiar with
some form or other of Taglish, in which there is
constant interchange and fusion between Tagalog
and English – so that the mestizo language of the
original Noli would surely have seemed agreeably
contemporary
- Its elimination in the translation services to distance
rather than familiarize the national hero

BOWDLERIZATION
- It is plain that Guerrero bowdlerized many
passages which made him uncomfortable –
passages alluding to political or religious
matters as well as swear words and references
to bodily functions.
- A nice example of the first is a sly passage where
Rizal discusses the superstitious veneration of
Captain Tiago for certain religious images:
anonymous collectivity as the most renowned
performers from Manila
- What is puzzling is that Guerrero was certainly
widely enough read to know that references to
now forgotten show-biz celebrities in the novels
in no way impede the immediacy and
verisimilitude of the worlds they present their
readers.
- While the young Filipinos of the 1950s would
certainly not know who Yeyeng was, they would
recognize her name as Tagalog and thus see her
as a Filipino; if Carvajal is a Spanish name, it is
nonetheless borne by a contemporary mestizo mini
star movie
- One would have thought that keeping Rizal’s
names would have served to bring the milieu of
the 1880s closer to modern readers rather than
estranging them for it.
DE-EUROPEANIZATION
- Rizal was an unusually cultivated man, made
familiar through his Jesuit schooling with Latin
and the world of antiquity.
- He knew Spanish, English, French and German,
as well as a smattering of Italian and Hebrew. He
also ready widely in European literature
- It is not surprising, to find the Noli filled with
untranslated classical tags, as well as
references to and quotations from famous
European masters
- Guerrero’s approach to all these references was to
eliminate them or to naturalize them as far as
possible
- I fear lest we may be beginning to decline. Whom
Jupiter wishes to destroy he first makes mad. Rizal
does not translate the Latin because he assumes his
readers will understand his tag. He is also having fun
at the Dominican’s expense by having the divines
refer with comic mislearning, to the Roman
superdivinity, although the Church Father had long
ago converted Euripides’ mysterious Greek Daimon
nito Christian Deus
- Guerrero eliminated both the Latin and the
barb. The result is the erasure of Rizal’s civilized
laughter.
 - Rizal’s sarcastic use of la palanca del mundo
makes a clear reference to Archimedes
celebrated lever, Guerrero bleached the erudite
malice out.
- Where Rizal calls his chief villainess Medusa,
Guerrero simply used her name Dona
Consolacion
- Champollion became the most eminent
Egyptologisy
- The wise old man Tasio, whom Rizal describes as a
filisofo, Philippine representative of Diderot’s
Enlightenment rationalism and skepticism – became
Guerrero’s contextless scholar.
- Vanished are Chloe, Actaeon, Snow White, Leonidas,
Pluto, Argus, Ariadne, Minos, Bacchus, Astarte
Gentrix and the Diana of Ephesus with her numerous
breasts as well as many others
- For the effect of his de-Europeanized translation
is not Filipinize Rizal, but rather to Americanize
him.
ANACHRONISM
- The most striking examples of anachronism all, in
different ways, relate to the changing official
social-political classification system operating
in the Philippines in the 1880s and 1950s.
- The obvious metamorphosis is of Jolonese kris into
Malay kris. Rizal saw no need to italicize kris, a
word known to everyone in the archipelago and now.
- Guerrero’s italicization makes the kris stick out
as some kind of foreign word needing to be
explained to young Filipino.
- Malay would here serve to erase the fact that the
Muslims of the Philippines were a religious
minority beleaguered by a 90 percent Christian
majority, and thereby emphasize that the kris was
essentially Filipino
- The problems accumulate if we look at the way in
which Rizal uses ethnic, racial and political
terminologies. He sticks to the later Spanish-
colonial classifications: peninsulares, criollos,
mestizos, sangleyes and chinos, and indios or
naturales.
- Sometimes he also uses the terms mestizo and
criollo inconsistently, so that they appear to
overlap or correspond. The inconsistency was
characteristic when political, cultural and social
changes were making problematic the older
hierarchy
- The word Filipino was then just beginning a
momentous transformation. For most people in
the country – which everyone called Filipinas or Las
Filipinas – up to the end of the nineteenth century,
the word was principally a synonym of criollo or
 pure blooded Spaniard and it was always spelled,
Spanish style, with a small f.
- Guerrero’s handling of these terms is exceptionally
instructive. In the first place, Filipina, meaning
mestizo or criolla is typically rendered as
Filipina, meaning a female national of the
Philippines.
- Creoles virtually disappear, while mestizo is
most commonly rendered, Anglo-Saxon racist
style as half breed.
- The context makes it quite plain that Rizal means she
thought of an administrator for her family’s financial
affairs. But Guerrero modernized, nationalized
and nonsensicalized the sentence as he would
have to be a Spaniard from Spain; she had no
confidence in Filipinos
- Where Rizal has a creole girl enquired, Guerrero
offered a half-breed girl interrupted.
- In Rizal’s sentence Filipinas appears as an
adjective qualifying espanolas so that Filipina
Spaniards would be intolerably visible dystranslation
- Guerrero’s ingenious solution is to give a correct
translation but at the same time to make sure
that nothing betrays the presence in Rizal’s
original of Filipinas
The circumstances under which Guerrero undertook his
translation of Rizal was quite important
 - His introduction to The Lost Eden was dated Rizal
Day [December 30] 1959, a bare three months
after the Robertson brouhaha; that to Fili,
Mayday of the Centenary of Rizal’s Birth, 1961,
a few months after Recto’s death
- It seems plausible that realizing he had little hope
of playing any further role in high-level politics,
he was turning, as others in his family had done to
him, to the construction of a reputation as a
nationalist intellectual and litterateur.
- He quickly followed up these translations with a
prize-winning English language biography of
Rizal and a collection of Spanish language articles
and speeches, entitled El Si y el No, which won the
Zobel literary prize in 1963
Two generals lines of investigation suggests themselves
to be followed up at different levels, but by no means
necessarily in conflict with each other. Both invite us,
from contrasting perspectives to think about the passing
of political time.
 The first is the near-universal passage from the era in
which nationalism was primarily a popular
insurrectionary movement, outside of and against
a state to an era in which it is partially
transformed into a legitimating instrumentality
of a new-old state.
 Rizal was the central figure in the imagining and
mobilization of a popular Philippine
 nationalism against the two states: the autocratic,
clerical-colonial state based in Manila, and the
fissiparous, half liberal-republican-half-clerical-
monarchical imperial state based in Madrid.
 This task involved a strenuous campaign both of
deconstruction and construction. The colonial
state and its reactionary ecclesiastical allies had to
be unmasked, while a Philippines profoundly
distinct from Mother Spain had to be conjured
up.
 For both purposes, in different ways, the novel as
literary genre was perfectly adapted. For it
permitted the imagining of Las Filipinas as a
bounded sociological reality encompassing
dozens of social types, at every social level,
engaged in daily, simultaneous interaction with one
another.
 It allowed the reader to see, in unmatched polemical
detail, the congeries of exploitation, brutality,
hypocrisy, cowardice, fanaticism, stupidity,
ignorance, and corruption which made colonial
domination possible
 It was really suited for Rizal’s remarkable
satirical gifts. It is in this context that we can
observe how essential to his purposes were
some of the Noli’s rhetorical mannerisms and
devices which Guerrero precisely did his best
to erase.
 The novel was perhaps was necessarily, set in the
past, but the author was eager to assure
readers that God continued affectionately to
multiply spongers and gatecrashers in Manila
 Under the colonial autocracy the ordinary reader
would have no chance to observe directly the
secret machinations of Dominicans or
governors-general; but the author could take the
same reader by the hand and let him invisibly
eavesdrop on these shady doings.
 Everyone knew that under the façade of
statesmanlike pronunciamentos and pious
sermons, the rulers, and their wives, mistresses and
concubines swore obscenely urinated, mixed
Tagalog expressions with their often
ungrammatical Spanish got their Latin wrong- and
lived on exactly this street, sent people to prison,
enjoyed a tacky vaudeville show in this theatre and
plotted in that friary
 Rizal’s prime strategy to show all of this with the
most convincing and immediate social realism
at his command: hence puneta, susmariosep,
yeyeng, Pasay, salakot, Jolo and so forth
 For this postindependence establishment, with
its precarious domestic and international presitige,
Rizal – Lolo [Grandfather] Rizal – appeared as both
amigo and emigo. Of mixed Spanish – Chinese –
 indio descent and of comfortable circumstances, he
was one of them.
 His heroism and self-sacrifice were utterly
exemplary. He was the one Filipino after whom
streets were named in Spain and Germany, and
whose writings were translated into Hindi, French,
Indonesian, English and Russian
 His statues dotted the plazas of a hundred
Philippine small towns. He was the center of a
widespread popular cult among the peasants.
 He acted as a general guarantor of the truth of
Philippine nationalism – in a certain sense, even
as its alibi
 But he was also an enemigo, he was himself a
nationalist and he wrote and wrote and wrote.
 Rizal had denounced the suppression of women:
Claro Recto had singlehandedly prevented the
Philippines from following the United States in
granting female suffrage after World War I.
 Rizal had satirized collaborating mestizo
hacendados; Leon Ma. Was President of the
International Sugar Federation and the Filipino
legislature was dominated by collaborating sugar
barons
 Rizal mercilessly ridiculed the Catholic
hierarchy: but in the 1950s the Filipino Cardinal
Rufino Santos was very much the spiritual child of
 the reactionary Spanish clerisy of the colonial era;
and Leon Ma’s uncle, Bishop Cesar could easily have
wandered into the pages of the Noli and Fili
 Perhaps the considerations encouraged the
translator to undertake some bowdlerization
and by de-modernization, exclusion of the reader
and decolonization, to distance Rizal’s Philippines
as much as possible from the Philippines to his
own time.
 The very fact of independence made possible,
even necessary, from a certain perspective, the
appearance in the archipelago of official
nationalism. This is the form of nationalism which
surfaces as an emanation and armature of the
state.
 It manifest itself, not merely in official ceremonies of
commemoration, but in a systematic programme,
directed primarily, if not exclusively, through the
state’s school system, to create and disseminate an
official nationalist history, an official nationalist
pantheon of heroes, and an official nationalist
culture, through the ranks of its younger, incipient
citizens – naturally in the state’s own interests.
Instilling faith in, reverence for, and obedience to its
very self
 It manifest itself, not merely in official
ceremonies of commemoration, but in a
 systematic programme, directed primarily, if not
exclusively, through the state’s school system
 One can see that a socially, radical, iconoclastic,
satirical, earthly, moralizing Rizal was not readily
adaptable to this programme. From this point of view
of nationalism, heroes should be revered, not
admired; seen not heard- nor read.
For much of his adult life Leon Ma. Guerrero was a loyal
and intelligent servant of the Philippine state. It is hard
not to suspect that in his translations of Rizal the
demands of this state did not serve, as his
strategic compass.
American imperialism and its consequences, the most
important of these consequences were the substitution
of American for Spanish as the lingua franca of the
archipelago and a fundamental reshaping of Filipinos’
conception of themselves.
 According to the census of 1939, less than 3
percent of the population claimed competence
in Spanish, while over 26 percent professed
ability in English. At the very end of the Spanish
period only 5 percent of the population of the
Philippines was Spanish fluent.
 Given that the elite of Rizal’s generation used
Spanish comfortably as its lingua franca, if the
First Republic had permitted to survive, its
educational status would have speared Spanish as
the national language
  The speedy triumph of American came about
because of the colonial regime established the
first modern state school system and at the
same time made competence in English
necessary for access to proliferating
bureaucratic jobs and most professional
careers. The language became, for tens of
thousands of Filipinos, the gateway to social,
political and economic advancement
 American thus replaced Spanish as the
language of power in the colony, it bore a quite
different relationship with local vernacular, especially
Tagalog
 The many terms and phrases from the
vernaculars seeped into Spanish, which in any case
was not policied by a standardized school
system.
 Under the American regime the once powerful
Catholic church was reduced to a political
margin
 A new American-style educational system was
installed, which turned out lawyers and engineers
rather than theologians and classicists. American rule
coincided with the advent of commercial radio and
film, which had an enormous impact on at least
urban Philippine society
Bearing all this in mind, we can perhaps better
understand why Guerrero de-Europeanized his Noli,
and why he could speak of so many young Filipinos
who no longer have any idea of the customs of
their forefathers.
 Rizal was a patriot while Guerrero was a
nationalist
 He knew very well what Las Filipinas was and its
features were found in maps, atlases, newspapers
and books. Las Filipinas had been around for 350
years.
 There was as yet no general name for the varied
inhabitants: Filipinos were still mainly Spanish
creoles. He did ofcourse speak of the pueblo, the
people, but lineaments remain obscure because he
used it very often for the local inhabitants.
 The real lines he drew were those characteristic of
what Brading calls “creole patriotism – political,
moral and affectional lines- between lovers of the
patria adorada and of justice, and their
enemies and oppressors.
 Throughout the two novels there are patriotic and
oppressive members of each traditional
stratum of colonial system – criollos, mestizos,
indios and even peninsulares
 It was among the achievements of Rizal and the
revolutionaries of his generation to imagine,
gradually, a new historical person: the Filipino
As nationalism spread, as suffrage expanded, and as a
second independence was achieved
 Filipinos increasingly took the place of Las
Filipinas as the objects of rhetorical and
genuine achievement. Guerrero was a striking
product of this immense subterranean shift.
 Rizal’s way of viewing the world around him had
become virtually incomprehensible. It is this
transformation of social classifications, that we
may find the solution to the puzzle of
anachronism in Guerrero’s translation of the
Noli
 The influence of Anglo-Saxon racism, may help to
account for Guerrero’s strange translation of
mestizo by half-breed despite the fact that Rizal and
he himself were, by these terms also half-breed.
 A different transformation that began in a small way
in the 1930s and has reached flood tide today: the
permanent movement of innumerable
inhabitants of Las Filipinas far beyond the old
archipelago’s borders.
 For this mass emigration has created hundreds of
thousands of people who come from Philippines
but are no longer among its citizenry, no longer
figures in the landscape of the Heimat
  But they are profoundly attached to an identity
which Guerrero would have understood and which
to Lolo Jose would have seemed quite extraordinary.
 Before 1521 we could have been anything and
everything not Filipino; after 1565 we can be
nothing but Filipino thanks to the technical and
cultural revolution produced by the Spanish conquest
POSTSCRIPT
- Guerrero mentioned with special pride his success in
rendering the celebrated scene where the not yet
sinister, still young Dona Consolacion and her
husband argue over how to pronounce Filipinas
- Rizal’s laughter in this passage is aimed at the
brutishness, ignorance and stupidity of La
Consolacion’s peninsular husband. He gets even
the Spanish name for the colony wrong, as well as
the main who is said to have coined this name in the
sixteenth century: Alvaro de Saavedra
- But as a minor motif, Rizal quietly shows up La
Consolacion’s pathetic European pretensions by
having her blurt out the Tagalog interrogative
particle ba.
- All of this fun is erased in Guerrero’s version
- A second minor target is the Spanish language,
sine Las Filipinas is not a form which can be logically
derived from Felipe , no matter how logically the
corporal an his young wife try to make it so
- But in Guerrero’s version the target has become
Filipino difficulties in distinguishing between p
and f.
- Guerrero’s omission of the final paragraph is the
most instructive of all. There is in this way no lying
History.
The Theory of Nationalism – Video/ Reflections from
the Readings
Immagined Communinties – Benedict Anderson
1.Nation Imagined as Limited
- Finite number of members or population
- Limited by territorial boundaries
- No nations imagines itself coterminous with
mankind
- As stated by Anderson, the most messianic
nationalists do not dream of when all the
members of the human race will join their
nation
- For instance, Christians imagined dreamed of a
wholly Christian planet – but this is impossible
- The nation is imagined as limited because even the
largest of them, encompassing perhaps a billion
living human beings, has finite, if elastic,
boundaries, beyond which lie other nations. No
nation imagines itself coterminous with mankind.
 The most messianic nationalists do not dream of a
day when all the members of the human race will
join their nation in the way that it was possible, in
certain epochs, for, say, Christians to dream of a
wholly Christian planet.
2.Nation imagined as Community
- Nation is always conceived as deep horizontal
comradeship despite the inequalities and
exploitations
- Fraternity makes it possible to imagine nation
as community
- Many people have willingly die for the sake of
nation – throughout the history
- Nations have cultural roots
- Perhaps the origins of these nationalistic acts lies in
the cultural roots of nationalism
- Finally, it is imagined as a community, because,
regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation
that may prevail in each, the nation is always
conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship.
Ultimately it is this fraternity that makes it possible,
over the past two centuries, for so many millions of
people, not so much to kill, as willingly to die for such
limited imaginings.
3. Nation Imagined as a Sovereign
- Concept of nation was born in age of
enlightenment and revolution
- Destroyed the legitimacy of the divinely,
ordained, hierarchical dynastic realm
- Nations fought for independence
- Nations dream of being free – the gage of this
freedom is a sovereign state
- It is imagined as sovereign because the concept was
born in an age in which Enlightenment and
Revolution were destroying the legitimacy of the
divinely-ordained, hierarchical dynastic realm.
Coming to maturity at a stage of human history when
even the most devout adherents of any universal
religion were inescapably confronted with the living
pluralism of such religions, and the allomorphism
between each faith's ontological claims and territorial
stretch, nations dream of being free, and, if under
God, directly so. The gage and emblem of this
freedom is the sovereign state.
Contextualization aids comprehension. Generally, to
contextualize something is to place it within its proper
and larger setting in which it presents its true and
complete meaning. As Jose Rizal was born and grew up
in the 19th century, to contextualize him — so as to
properly understand his life, thoughts, and works — is to
understand the social and political context of that
century.
 19th Century was an era of challenges and
responses
 It is the period of major changes that affect man
and society
 It is the Age of Enlightenment
Framework of Reference (The world of 19th
century)
1. Political Context: The struggle of Nations for
Nationalism (see The French Revolution, The
American civil war)
2. Economic Context: Beginnings of Modernization
(see Industrial Revolution)
 3. Socio-cultural Context: Toward Modern
Consciousness: Intellectual and Cultural
Developments (see the Protestant Reformation,
Emergence of Mass Society in the West)
Nineteenth century is commonly depicted as the birth of
modern life, as well as the birth of many nation-
states around the globe. The century was also a
period of massive changes in Europe (which
includes Spain) and consequently, in the Philippines. It
was during this era that the power and glory of Spain,
the Philippines' colonizer, had waned both in its
colonies and in the world.
Rizal in the Context of Nineteenth-Century Philippines
The purpose of this essay is to single out some major
economic, political, cultural and religious
developments of the nineteenth century that
influenced Rizal’s growth as a nationalist and conditioned
the evolution of his thought.
- Without an understanding of that milieu one can
scarcely understand Rizal’s enduring importance
to the Filipino people nor the relevance of his ideals
and ideals today.
- One of the ironies of the cult rendered to Rizal as a
national hero is that often his words, rather than
his thoughts, have been invoked without any
consideration of the historical context in which
they were spoken or of the issues they addressed.
 - It has been possible alternately to portray the
American colonial system as the fulfillment of
Rizal’s aspirations, to picture him as an ineffectual
reformist unable to bring himself to accept the
national revolution envisaged by Bonifacio, and
to invoke him as patron of the ideals of the
Marcos New Society
- Renato Constitution, it has often been veneration
without understanding, hence no veneration at
all.

ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT
The flowering of the nationalist movement in the late
nineteenth century could scarcely be possible without the
economic growth which took place in the nineteen-
century Philippines, particularly after about 1830.
- The growth of an export economy in those years
brought increasing prosperity to the Filipino
middle and upper classes who were in a position
to profit by it, as well as to the Western merchants
who organized it
- It also brought into the Philippines both the
machinery and the consumer goods which the
industrialized economies of the West could
supply, and that Spain could not, or would not,
supply.
Year Exports (in pesos) Imports (in Total Trade
pesos) (in pesos)
1825 1,000,000 1,800,000 2,800,000
1875 18,900,000 12,200,000 31,100,000
1895 36,000,000 25,400,000 62,000,000

Philippine exports in this burgeoning economy were

agricultural products and a rapidly growing population,
needed increased amounts of rice.
- Thus, those who controlled large rice, sugar and
abaca growing lands profited the most
- These included not only the Filipino hacienderos and
the friar orders owning the large haciendasbut also
the inquilinos of the friar haciendas
- Many of these inquilinos were equivalently
hacienderos in their own right, passing on from
one generation to the next the lands they rented
from the friar hacienda, and farming them by
means of their share-tenants or kasama.
- To the latter they stood in a semifeudal
relationship little different from that which existed
between owner-hacenderos and their tenants
The prosperity which the next export economy had
brought to some may be illustrated by the case of Rizal’s
Chinese ancestor Domingo Lam-co
- When he has come to the Binan hancienda in mid-
eighteenth century, the average holding of an
inquilino was 2.9 hectares after Rizal’s father had
moved to the Calamba hacienda, the Rizal family in
 the 1890s rented from the hacienda over 390
hectares.
But on the friar haciendas, rising property has also
brought friction between inquilinos and haciendas
as lands grew in value and rents were raised
- A combination of traditional methods and
modernizing efficiency led to disputes, ultimately
over who should reap the larger parts of the fruits
of the economic boom.
- Eventually, this would lead to a questioning of the
friar’s rights to the haciendas.
- But it is a gross misnomer to speak of the
Revolution as an agrarian revolt in the modern
sense. For it would not be the kasama who would
challenge friar ownership, but the prosperous
inquilinos.
- And their motive would be as much political as
economic- to weaken the friar’s influence in
Philippine political life.
POLITICAL DEVELOPMENT
Modernizing Filipinos saw the colonial policies of Spain as
not only not the causes of the existing economic
prosperity, but increasingly as positive hindrances
preventing further progress and even threatening
what had already been achieved.
- In Spain Liberals succeeded Conservatives at
irregular intervals as one or the other proved
incapable of coping with the problems of
 governing the nation. The instability of those
governments made it impossible to develop any
consistent policy for the overseas colonies.
- Both parties used the Philippines as a handy
dumping ground to reward party hangers-on
with jobs. Hence, each change of government
brought another whole new mob of job seekers
to the Philippines, ready to line their pockets
with Filipino money before they would be replaced
by still others.
- Filipinos were deprived of these few positions
they had formerly held in the bureaucracy while
the vast majority of Spanish bureaucrats had no
interest in, or even knowledge of the country
they were supposed to be governing
- The Spanish bureaucracy had always been
characterized by graft and corruption
- With the opening of Suez Canal in 1869 and
relatively easy passage between Spain and the
Philippines, most became birds of prey, staying
only long enough to feather their nests.
Far worse in many ways than the corruption of the
government was its inability to provide for basic
needs of public works, schools, peace and order, and
other prerequisites to even a semi-modern economy.
- Created to rid the provinces of the bands of
tulisanes, the Guardia Civil not only failed to
achieve this end, but became an oppressive force
in the provinces, harassing farmers and using their
 position for personal profit as Rizal depicts so vividly
in his novels.
- The antiquated system of taxation in effect
actually penalized modernization, and the taxes
never found their way into the roads, bridges, and
other public works needed for agricultural progress.
Finally, high protective tariffs forced Filipinos to buy
expensive Spanish textiles and other products
instead of the traditional cheaper British ones
- In the face of a system that was both
exploitative and incapable of producing
benefits for the colony, liberal nationalists found
any compelling motive for maintaining the Spanish
colonial regime, as it became more and more clear
that reforms would not be forthcoming
- To a nationalist like Rizal, the decision to separate
from Spain had been made long since; since it was,
as the Spanish noted in 1896 a matter of when
and how the Revolution should come.
CULTURAL DEVELOPMENT
A key factor in the emergence of nationalism in the
late nineteenth century was the cultural development
consequent on the rapid spread of education about
1860.
- It has become a commonplace to speak of the role
of ideas learned by the European educated
illustrados in the emergence of the nationalist
movement.
 - In many respects, the spread of higher education
among middle and lower-middle-class Filipinos
who could not afford to go abroad was more
important for propagating the liberal and
progressive ideas written about from Europe by
Rizal or Del Pilar.
- The creation of a limited substantial number of
Filipino of all parts of the country who would
communicate in Spanish made possible for the
first time in history a movement that was both
regional and national in scope
One of the major influences of the educational of the
nineteenth century was the return of the Jesuits
- Expelled from the Philippines and the rest of the
Spanish empire in 1768, they finally returned in
1859 to take charge of the evangelization of
Mindanao
- Having escaped, from the general decline that in
the early part of the nineteenth century afflicted
the Philippine church and the system of
education that depended on it, they returned with
the ideas and methods new to the Philippine
education system
- Asked by the Ayuntamiento to take over the
municipal primary school in 1859, they renamed
it Ateneo Municipal and opened it to Filipino
students as well as the Spaniards for who it had
been founded.
 - By 1865 it had been transformed into a
secondary school that offered a level of
instruction beyond the official requirements
and more approximated today’s college than high
school.
- At the same time such a role was given to the
natural sciences that Rizal had the Filosofo Tasio
say, The Philippines owes (the Jesuits) the
beginnings of the Natural Sciences, would of the
nineteenth century.
Under the direction of the Jesuits too was that other new
education institution, the Escuela Normal de Meastros
- It was opened in 1865 to provide Spanish-
speaking teachers for the projected new
primary school system.
- The Escuela Normal represented a hope of
progress in the minds of many Filipinos, just as it
would be opposed by those for who modern
education for Filipinos posed a danger to the
continuance of Spanish rule.
- Rizal’ picture of the trials of the schoolteacher in the
Noli, if not perhaps typical, was certainly not
completely a caricature
- Jesuit sources frequently complain about the
opposition that the graduates of the Normal
School met from many parish priests
It was in the secondary schools that the ideas of
nationalism were to awake, even among those who
had never gone to Europe.
 - While still a university student in Manila, Rizal
would write in his Memorias that through his studies
of literature, science and philosophy, the eyes of my
intelligence opened a little, and my heart
began to cherish nobler sentiments.
- And more explicitly, speaking of his fifth year at
the Ateneo, through these studies, my patriotic
sentiments greatly developed
It was not that the Ateneo thought nationalist or the
liberal principles of progress
- But in imparting to its students a humanistic
education in literature, science and philosophy, in
inculcating principles of human dignity and
justice and the equality of all men, it effectively
undermined the foundations of the Spanish
colonial regime, even without the Spanish Jesuits
wishing to do so.
- The eyes of these Filipinos had been opened to a
much wider perspective than their narrow
Philippine experience before they ever set foot in
Europe, and they no longer would accept the
established order.
As the chapter of Rizal in El Filibusterismo in a class in the
university or his passing remarks in the Noli, show, the
Filipino nationalists were much less appreciative of
the other educational institutions, run by the
Dominicans
 - The weight of tradition hung much heavier on
these than on the newly founded Jesuit schools and it
would only be later in the century that they
would begin to modernize.
- Yet one has to remember that the early nationalist
leaders among the Filipino clergy, like Fr. Jose
Burgos and Fr. Mariano Sevilla, came from the
University of Santo Tomas without ever having
studied abroad
- Moreover, such later key figures as Marcelo del Pilar,
Emilio Jacinto, and Apolinario Mabini obtained their
education in San Jose, San Juan de Letran and
Santo Tomas
- As early as 1843, the Spanish official Juan de la
Matta had proposed the closing of these
institutions as being nurseries of subversive
ideas. It is clear that the university was
communicating something that stirred up the sparks
of nationalism.
A major factor in giving nationalism the form it actually
took was the experience of Filipino students in
Spain.
- Seeing the liberties enjoyed in the Peninsula,
they became all the more conscious of the
servitude which their people suffered
- The more perceptive saw the backwardness of
Spain in comparison with other European countries,
the corruption and futility of the Spanish
political system, and the system’s inability to
 promote even the welfare of Spain, much less
that of her colonies.
- Many who came to Europe still in hope of reform
and modernization in the Philippines came to
realize that this could never be achieved under
Spanish rule and that the Filipinos must look to
themselves.
- Umasa sa sariling lakas, as Rizal would say,
turning his back on Europe and returning to his
own country to carry on the struggle there.
One final cultural factor involved in the rise of nationalism
was the interest in the Filipino past, largely inspired
by the European, especially German, preoccupation
with history and ethnology
- Modern historical method was examining the
origins not only of the European nations themselves,
but of other peoples as well.
- Rizal was the principal to see the importance of
such historical investigation for the creation of
a national consciousness among his Filipino to
look to their heritage, and it was from him that
Rizal had learned that concern
- Rizal joined an historical consciousness formed by
German historiography, applying modern
historical method to the investigation of that
heritage
In the preface to his edition of Antonio de Morga’s
Suceses de las Islas Filipinas, his most important
historical work, Rizal outlines the processes by which
he had come to seek a foundation for his nationalism
in the historical past and emphasize the importance
of history to the national task
- Rizal seeks out all the evidence of a Filipino
civilization before the coming of the Spaniards
and tries to show how the intervening three
centuries have meant decline rather than
progress.
- He emphasizes Filipino values, contrasting them
with the Spanish and extolling the accomplishments
of his people.
- Rizal proves too much and veers toward the
opposite distortion from that of friars who had
denied all civilization the pre-Hispanic
Filipinos, he did lay a historical foundation in his
Morga and other essays for a national consciousness
and pride in the race which was to prove important
for the future.
RELIGIOUS DEVELOPMENTS
The growth of education was producing an ilustrado class,
not be completely identified with the wealthy. These
ilustrados were increasingly antifriar, at times even
anticlerical or anti-Catholic
- A simplistic historiography has attributed this
hostility to the abuses of the friars or to the
influence of Spanish anticlericalism.
- There is however, little or no evidence that these
were committed more in the latter part of the
 nineteenth century than at an earlier period, rather
the contrary
- The reason for this attitude among the ilustrados, is
to be sought else-where – in the intermingling of
the political and the religious so characteristic
of the Spanish Patronato Real, most especially in
the latter half of the nineteenth century.
As Spain became less and less willing or able to
promote the happiness and prosperity of the
Philippines, the Spanish colonial government leaned
more heavily on what had always been a mainstay of
Spanish rule – the devotion of Filipinos to their
Catholic faith.
- For this reason, even the most anticlerical of
Spanish governors maintained that it was
necessary to support the friars by every
means.
The religious orders have their defects, their vices and
their difficulties but in the Philippines they have two
qualities which from the political point of view are so
great and important that they oblige us to prescind
from whatever may be alleged against them.
- One of these qualities is their unshakeable
devotion to Spain
- The other is their influence on the natives, which
even it the weakened state in which it is today, is still
sufficiently great to consider it as a preserving factor
 - His successor, Juan Alminos, likewise and
anticlerical, could not sufficiently emphasize the
importance of the friars. No one, he felt could
deny their patriotism, which verges on
fanaticism, and they make the Indio believe that
only in living the Spaniards can he save his
soul in the next life.
That patriotism and the undeniable influence that
the friar parish priest had on the ordinary Filipino,
rather than those often recited but little documented
abuses of the friars, explain why friars inevitably
became the main target of the Filipino nationalists,
and of Rizal in particular
- The same may be said concerning the friar
haciendas.
- For Filipinos to win a lawsuit against a powerful
friar meant eventually to nullify that influence of
the friars which the Spanish government so
emphasized as a means to control the indios.
- A letter of Paciano Rizal to his brother Jose in
Europe, written at the height of the Calamba
hacienda dispute, is significant in this regard
- He had heard that Archbishop Nozaleda, then in
Europe, had proposed friar support for reforms
to the Filipino nationalists there, in the person of
Del Pilar, in order to end the antifriar campaign
of La Solidaridad.
The cause that Rizal is spoken of as upholding, and to
which economic interests were to be subordinated, was of
course the opportunity for Filipinos to run their own
affairs and eventually to throw off the yoke of
Spain completely.
- One can see here the paradox of Philippines
Catholicism at the end of the nineteenth
century
- The ordinary Filipino who had not gone to Manila or
abroad for higher education remained in the
traditional religious practices and beliefs of his
forefathers and continued to look up to his friar
parish priest as father of his people and
protector against oppressive government
officials.
- During the Revolution one of the great sources of
division was the sorrow with which the ordinary
Filipino saw his friar parish priest imprisoned and
taken away
- In some cases, notably among the Guardia he Honor,
this even led to violent opposition to the
Revolution; in others, to such a paradoxical
situation as that of the Dominican parish priest of
Orion, Bataan, who had taken refuge in the
church tower with Spanish soldiers when the
fighting broke out. When the Spanish troops could no
 longer hold out, Father Herrero came down to
arrange for surrender.
- On the other hand, the Filipino ilustrado educated in
Europe found the Catholic practice of his day
childish and incompatible with modern ideas.
- What was more, for the nationalists religion had
come to signify a means to perpetuate the status
quo, to maintain Spanish power in the
Philippines.
The picture of the religious environment in which
nineteenth century nationalism came to maturity
would be incomplete, above all for Rizal, without
the Filipino clergy
- Rizal and his fellow Propagandists partly the heirs
of the conflict between Filipino secular priests
and Spanish friars that had led to the martyrdom
of Fathers Burgos, Gomez and Zamora in 1872
- It was also in that conflict that the seeds of
nationalism, which were to come to full flower
among the Propagandists, had first been sowed.
- One cannot understand Rizal without knowing the
influence of Burgos on him.
- Rizal prolonged the incipient national
consciousness of which Burgos was the most
articulate spokesman, would hint at that influence
in a slightly fictionalized passage in an early chapter
of Noli
 - In the novel, Ibarra, just back from his studies in
Europe, passes by Bagumbayan, where the three
priests had been executed in 1872.
What heritage had Burgos passed on to the next
generation?
- He transformed the century-old dispute between the
Spanish friars and the Filipino secular clergy from an
intramural ecclesiastical controversy into a
clear assertion of Filipino equality with the
Spaniard, into a demand for justice to the
Filipino
- Archbishop Basilio Sancho de Sta. Justa, had
attempted to subject the religious orders to his
own jurisdiction and to that of the government
whose creature he was, by the overnight creation of
a Filipino clergy who would take their places.
- The chief victims of this power play had been the
Filipino clergy, whose slow but steady growth
had been accelerated at the expense of quality
- The lack of friars at the beginning of the
nineteenth century led to turning over many
parishes to the Filipino priests,
- But once the number of friars began to increase
again after about 1825, a series of moved to
deprive the Filipinos of the parishes once more
succeeded each other for the next fifty years
Just when a new generation of Filipino priests under
the leadership of Fr. Pedro Palaez were attempting to
disprove the age-old accusations against them by
showing that they were equal in ability to the friars,
the government hardened its position, filled with
suspicion that these priests as had earlier happened in
America, might become the leaders of Filipino
emancipation from Spain.
- Palaez died in the earthquake of 1863, accused
as a subversive.
- His role in fighting for the rights of the Filipino clergy
was taken over by one of his young disciples,
Jose Burgos, who published an anonymous
pamphlet the following year, defending the
memory of Palaez and calling for justice to the
Filipino clergy
- Burgos’s defense of the rights of the secular clergy in
his Manifesto, however goes beyond the scholarly
arguments from canon law used by Palaez to
urge the rights of the Filipino clergy to the
parishes; it blazes forth I a passionate challenge
to the whole nation of inferiority of the
Filipino, whether of Spanish blood or indigenous to
the European.
With Burgos, we see the first articulation of national
feeling, of a sense of national identity
- In spite of the accusations made against him for
which he was executed, there is no evidence that
Burgos ever aimed at separation of the Philippines
from Spain
- Rather his was first step, the expression of a sense
of those born in the Philippines being one
 people, with a national identity and national rights,
even under the sovereignty of Spain
- Rizal and others would move forwards what they had
come to see was the only way of maintaining that
identity and obtaining these rights – separation from
Spain; if need be, by means of a revolution
It is not any accident that we find numerous close
connections between the activist Filipino clergy led
by Burgos and the next generation of Filipinos who
would lead the Propaganda Movement of the 1880s
and 1890s
- The Propaganda Movement would be the heir of
the movement of the Filipino clergy and would
carry the ideas of national identity articulated by
Burgos to their next step and their logical conclusion.
The Propagandists would also be heirs to another allied
movement, but one distinct from that of the clergy- the
liberal reformists of the 1860s
- These were the modernizers, men who desired to
bring to the Philippines economic progress, a
modern legal system and the modern liberties –
freedom of the press, of association, of speech and of
worship
- . All of these goals would of course be part of the
goals of the nationalist movement, but they were
not confined to natioanlists.
- Most of the men who appear prominently among
the liberal reformists who emerged into the public
 light in 1869-72 were criollos, Spaniards born in
the Philippines.
- These criollos had little or no desire to see the
Philippines separated from Spain, but rather
wished to see the liberties that had been
introduced into the Peninsula also extended to
Spanish Philippines
- Generally antifriar, those reformists saw in the
friars obstacles to progressive reforms and
modern liberties.

It was with enthusiasm therefore that they welcomed the

new governor, Carlos Ma. De la Torre, who arrived in
Manila in 1869, the appointee of the anti-clerical
liberals who had made the Revolution of 1868 in Spain
- When de la Torre opened to Manila some of the
freedom of expression proclaimed by the
Revolution, and announced his intention of
introducing reforms into the government, these
reformists cheered him on and were joined in their
demonstration by Father Burgos.
- The latter saw in the new liberal government, with its
proclaimed respect for liberty and equality, the
hope of gaining recognition for the justice of
the Filipino priests’ cause.
 - In spite of the governor’s professed liberalism and his
cordiality, he was suspicious of both groups and
had put them under secret police surveillance.
Before long he was succeeded by another appointee of
the Revolution, Gen. Rafael Izquierdo.
- Even more than with De la Torre, for Izquierdo liberal
reforms were for the Peninsula, not the
colonies.
- He did not even keep up the pretense of
predecessor, but quickly suppressed the reform
committees and ended even the appearances of
liberty of expression allowed by De la Torre
- The clergy and the reformists continued their
struggle through friendly political influence in
Madrid, little realizing that their steps where
watched
When finally the opportunity came, with the outbreak
of what was to all evidence a merely local mutiny
over local grievances in the garrison of Cavite,
within hours all had been arrested
- Before the month was over three priests had gone
to their death by the garrote, while their
colleagues and their reformist allies were on their
way to exile in Guam, despite their political
influences in Madrid.
- Their execution manifested Izquierdo’s conviction
that the friars were a necessary political
instrument for maintaining the loyalty of the
 Filipinos to Spain; therefore, by the same token,
the Filipino priests who might replace them in
the parishes must be eliminated.
- Those who clamored for liberal reforms would
be silenced, but they were only a passing
annoyance; the clergy who represented the
growing Filipino consciousness of their rights
as equal to any Spaniard must be crushed.
When the exiles finally returned to Manila, they knew
better than to expose themselves a second time
- Only with the Revolution would the survivors, Fr.
Pedro Dandan and Fr. Mariano Sevilla reappear
in the public eye.
- Father Dandan would die fighting in the
mountain in 1897.
- Father Sevilla would work to rally Filipinos to
resist the Americans, and once more be
condemned to exile in Guam, this time by the
Americans.
- Many of the liberal reformists of 1872, on the
other hand, no longer returned to the
Philippines once they were free but made their
homes in Hong Kong or in Europe
- The issue had been precisely that – liberal reforms,
rather than Filipino rights – and when they could
not obtain these in the Philippines, they lived
elsewhere.
Since the Propaganda Movement was also heir to the
liberal reformist tradition, the degree to which the
Propagandists were truly nationalist, like Rizal and Del
Pilar, or merely liberal reformists, like many of their
colleagues in the campaign of La Solidaridad, would only
be made clear once war had broken out with the
Americans and the latter were offering the reforms which
had been sought in vain from Spain.
- To the reformists, American offer would be
enough; it was what they had really been looking
for all along. For the nationalists, the struggle
would go on till it became hopeless.
- Faced with a new colonial power, the clergy
continued to play its role in the rise of
nationalism
- The Americans directing the crushing of guerilla
resistance, all singled out the Filipino priests as
the most dangerous enemy and the soul of the
Filipino resistance.
- At the height of the guerilla war in 1901 numerous
priests in all parts of the country were in prison and
not a few especially in the Visayas suffered torture
and even death for complicity with the
guerillas.
- Though the initiative in the nationalist movement
had passed from the Filipino priests to the
young ilustrados in Europe and Manila in the
1880s, the clergy remained a powerful force in the
Revolution and the major factor in keeping the
masses loyal.
MAIN CURRENTS OF THE NATIONALIST MOVEMENT
In recent years certain generalizations have been
used concerning the nationalist movement of the
nineteenth century and the revolution that emerged from
it
- Such catchwords as the secularization movement,
the reform movement, the reform of the masses
and the betrayal of the ilustrados obscure more
than clarify the character of Filipino nationalism
- The same might be said of attempts to describe
the Revolution as a proletarian or lower-middle
class movement captured by the bourgeois
ilustrado reformists and other such explanations that
come more for ideological constructs than from
an examination of historical realities.
- By oversimplifying complex events in a
complex society, they fail to give an account of the
reality that was.
To understand what happened in the nineteenth-century
movement culminating in the Revolution, it is necessary
to distinguish the several different currents that went into
movement.
- At least five can be considered – the reformist, the
liberal, the anticlerical, the modernizing, and the
strictly nationalist.
- Each individual need not be placed under one of
these categories, for they certainly overlapped.
- Almost all nationalists were liberals in some
respect almost all were in favor of
 modernization. So too most liberals were also
anticlerical, or at least antifriar.
- It is necessary to distinguish what was really
most important for individuals or groups in
order to understand what they aimed at in
supporting the Revolution, and why they did or
did not continue to do so when certain ends
had been achieved.
Probably most Filipinos, certainly all thinking ones
and even Spaniards with any interest in the
country, can be called reformists in some sense in the
late nineteenth century; the Spanish colonial regime
obviously failed any longer to satisfy basic needs
and desires of the Filipino people
- As intimated in the letter of Paciano Rizal we have
quoted, many of the friars themselves desired
reforms.
- They even appear to have offered to make joint
cause with the Filipinos in Spain to obtain such
reforms, for all suffered from the inefficient and
corrupt bureaucracy, from the antiquated and
contradictory laws, from the exploitation of the
Philippine treasury by the mother country, and
from the inability of the government to maintain
peace and order.
- Indeed, in an earlier period the harshest
condemnation of Spanish misgovernment came
from the friars. It was only when the cause of
 reform began to take on antifriar and nationalistic
overtones that they opposed it.
Though by no means all reformists were liberals,
liberals were almost by definition reformists as well.
- For the safeguards of personal liberty – freedom of
speech and of the press, freedom of association,
freedom of religion and especially freedom from
arbitrary arrest and detention and exile or
imprisonment without a trial – could only be
obtained with major reforms in the existing
colonial government.
- With the partial exception of freedom of
religion, those liberties were the aspiration of
all the activist Filipinos who participated in the
Propaganda Movement
- Together with the demand for representation in
the Spanish Cortes, they headed the list of
reforms demanded by La Solidaridad.
As Rizal would write Blumentritt, these liberties were
an essential component of any progress worth the
name.
- So integral were the aspirations to civil liberties
to the program of the Propagandists
- Not to the men who created a Filipino nation
long before the Americans ever established
themselves
In the circumstances of the time, to be liberal very
often meant to be anticlerical or at least antifriar
 - It was to the well-justified dear that ecclesiastical
power would be used to suppress liberal
progress.
- Church property had so often been confiscated
in Europe and the personal rights of ecclesiastics
so often violated in the name of the new
freedom.
- Whether or not they full agreed with the liberals, the
Filipino clergy was much less likely to be target
of liberal antipathy.
- This was true even on the part of those liberals who
cared little for the bond of common nationality, since
the Filipino clergy were powerless to block
liberal reforms, even if they had wanted to,
Modernization was a desire of all liberals, as it would
be of nationalists in general. But the converse was by no
means true.
- Modernization was primarily an economic goal,
and many of those who were deeply interested in
progressive economic measures sought them for
the profit they themselves would derive, not for
the country.
- Many of these men were conservative politically.
Though desiring far-reaching economic changes in
Philippine society, they had no desire to create a
new nation.
- When the Spanish regime fell under the onslaught of
the Revolution, conservative modernizers had no
regrets, for they realized how little hope there
 was of Spain ever doing away with all the
archaic obstacles to economic progress.
When the Philippine Republic emerged, they
supported it cautiously, intending to control it.
- When they saw they very likely could not, or that
an American regime promised more in the way of
immediate peace and order and ultimate
economic growth than could the newborn
Revolutionary government, they had few qualms
about accepting positions in the new colonial regime,
even while still holding positions in the Revolutionary
government.
- Such were men like T. H. Pardo de Tavera, nephew
of the exile of 1872, friend of Rizal and the Lunas in
Paris. Although a bitter enemy of the friars and
high-ranking anticlerical Mason, he was among
the first to accept a position in the American
government.
- He would be one of the first Filipino members of
the Philippine Commission, though he had been
named Secretary of Foreign Affairs in the
government of Aguinaldo
- A similar case was Jose Ma. Basa, exile of 1872,
who perhaps did more than any individual to
promote the campaign against the friars in the
1880s and 1890s. He was also the main souce by
which the writings of Rizal, Del Pilar and others
of the Propaganda Movement were smuggled into
the Philippines.
 - Together with Doroteo Cortes, former head of the
Comite de Propaganda in Manila which had
supported Del Pilar and La Solidaridad for five
years, Basa was among the first to petition the
American consul in Hong Kong for an American
protectorate over the Philippines
The establishment of an American colonial
government would sort out those who had been
agitating openly or secretly during the decade before the
Revolution
- It would make clear who were only reformists, or
liberals, or anticlericals, or modernizers, but not
truly nationalists.
- For all of the former the American government gave
assurance that their main goals would be
achieved; only the nationalist would see the
frustration of the principal goal for which they
struggled
- During the earlier years of struggle this line of
nationalist thought had attracted not only those
who yearned for an independent Philippines, but
numerous others who goals were at least
partially different, or who supported only part of
the nationalist program.
- Now the real nationalists were left to
themselves. It would be an exaggeration to say that
the masses as a whole stood behind the nationalist
struggle, but large numbers of them did
The kalaayan they looked for might not be the same
concept as the independencia conceived by Rizal,
Bonifacio and Mabini.
- But the freedom they longed for was nearer to the
nationalists’ idea of independence than were the
goals of economic progress, political reforms and
modernization sought by many of ilustrados who had
supported the Propaganda Movement, only to shift
their loyalties in the hour of crisis.
- For the goals now achieved from the Americans had
only partially coincided with those of leaders
like Rizal who had seen the struggle primarily as
a movement aimed at the creation of a national
consciousness, the making of the Revolution
- Rizal of course favored reforms in Philippine
society, not only by Spaniards, but by the Filipinos
themselves.
- He opposed the influence of the friars on that
same society, for he saw them as an obstacle of
freedom and to progress.
- He was devoted to the modernization of his
country, so that, as he put it, she might take her
place among the proud nations of Europe.
- But what he sought above all was that his country
should be free, free from tyrants from abroad
or at home, a country where there would not be any
 tyrants because Filipinos would not allow themselves
to be slaves.
- It was the growth of a free people, proud of its
past, working for its future, united in a common set
of ideals. This vision it was which made him the
center of the nationalist movement of his day
and the principal inspiration of the Revolution.
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In Sociology, it is a principle that is widely accepted that
we see life of an individual and how he has lived his
life within his society and even the role the society
played in the life of an individual.
- The Sociological Imagination’’
A great and unique feature of Rizal is that he did not
only understand what is going on in a society and
the value of valuable information about his society.
He also had a great mind that allows him to exploit
this knowledge in a way that he could think about what
was going on in the world and what might have
been happening within himself
This is what sociologists such as Wright Mills call the
Sociological Imagination
Having the so-called sociological imagination, people
may view inner life and career in terms of a larger
historical force. Individuals who possess this quality of
mind can do a better understanding of their
experiences by situating themselves in history.
They can recognize the responses available to them
by becoming aware of all the individuals who share
the same situation as them.
From that alone, even sociologists alone would agree that
how great of a mind or a thinker Rizal was
People who are unable to locate their lives in history
are most likely do not know how to respond
effectively to a world which the lives of the people
around the world are interconnected and sees the
one society’s problem as a part of a larger global
problem
Contrarily, people who have a sociological imagination
can fully grasp history in the context of the
realities they face and will see the connection
between the two
Rizal had all of these qualities, he knew his place in the
greater scheme of things and he understood the
societal forces shaping his life thus he was able to
respond in ways that benefited not just the people
of his time but even the Filipinos of all generations
Renato Constantino said that Rizal is indeed the first
Filipino