Why Rizal Lost Faith in Religion

By Herbert Vego

ON Monday (December 30), the nation will mark its most “heroic” holiday, Rizal Day, to commemorate the death anniversary of our national hero, Dr. Jose P. Rizal, who died before a Spanish firing squad at the Luneta (what is now Rizal Park) on December 30, 1896 at the young age of 35.

He could have lived longer by kowtowing to the Spanish colonial government.  Instead, he sacrificed his abundant life while articulating his people’s outcry against a barbaric regime pretending to be Christian.

Last Christmas, I reviewed an April 4, 1893 letter of Rizal, originally written in Spanish to Jesuit superior Fr. Pablo Pastells, which espoused belief in God but not in organized religion.

He wrote in part: “All the brilliant and subtle arguments of Your Reverence, which I shall not attempt to refute because I would have to write a treatise, cannot convince me that the Catholic Church is endowed with infallibility. The religion of Christ was the most perfect, but due to the modifications introduced into it, by malice or religious fanaticism, it has become like an edifice, which because of so many modifications has been so disfigured and threatens to fall apart.”

He would rather think for himself, not swallowing hook, line and sinker religious dogmas that could liken man to a robot.

Even elementary-school students are familiar with a line in his last poem “Mi Ultimo Adios,” where he declared, “For I go where no slave before the oppressor bends, where faith can never kill, and God reigns everywhere.”

Rizal taught that what God had given us is a rational mind. Anybody who allows his God-given mind to be controlled by others fears that disobedience to the Church – which shared power with the state — could lead to the death penalty.

Because of their vow of celibacy, priests stay single – resulting in “sperm failure” or inability to create human life. Why do they preach marriage but remain unmarried?

Unfortunately, while it has already been more than a century since we gained our independence from the Spanish era, we are still under the spell of religious leaders who threaten us with fire and brimstone if we don’t toe their line.

History throbs with cases of erroneous theocratic decisions. The most infamous of them all was the conviction and life imprisonment under house arrest of famous Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei for heresy in 1633 – all because he had taught that the Earth revolved around the Sun.

The official Church position at that time was that the Sun revolves around the Earth – an idea borrowed from Greek philosopher Aristotle.

It was not until 346 years later in 1979 that Pope John Paul II declared that the Roman Catholic Church “may have been mistaken in condemning Galileo.”

History does not support the Church’s “pro-life” advocacy. On the contrary, the clergy had had killed thousands of “heretics” from the dawn of the Christian era to the 18th Century.

On March 25, 1199, Pope Innocent III declared that “anyone who attempted to construe a personal view of god which conflicted with the church dogma must be burned without pity.”

The reign of Pope Gregory IX (1227-1241) saw the beginning of the Inquisition, a campaign of torture, mutilation, mass murder and destruction of human life.

In 1254, to ease the job of the inquisitors, Pope Innocent IV decreed that accusers could remain anonymous, preventing the victims from confronting them and defending themselves.

The inquisitors grew very rich, accepting bribes and fines from the wealthy who paid to avoid being prosecuted and dispossessed of property.

Rizal clarified in his letter to Fr. Pastells, however, that while he had lost faith in religion, he had never doubted the existence of God: “How can I doubt God when I am convinced of my own existence? Whoever recognizes the effect recognizes the cause. To doubt God would be to doubt one’s conscience and consequently, to doubt everything; and then, what is life for?”