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THE CHURCH UNDER ATTACK

May 5, 1956

There is a new outburst of anti-clericalism as Catholic politicians denounce the Catholic

hierarchy’s opposition to the bill requiring Filipino students to read the two controversial
novels of Rizal

By Teodoro M. Locsin
Staff Member

NOT for a long time has the Catholic Church, or, at any rate, the Catholic hierarchy in the
Philippines, been subjected to such attacks as it has for the last two weeks. Archbishops,
accustomed to having high government officials kiss the ring of their office, were mocked
and ridiculed, were called enemies of freedom, to great applause. Catholic political leaders
led the attack….

Did the hierarchy expect the attacks when it issued the pastoral letter objecting to the
Senate bill which would make the two novels of Rizal required reading in all public schools—
novels the hierarchy considered impious and heretical? If it did, and went ahead just the
same and registered its objection, it could only be because of an overriding concern for the
safety of the Faith; to read Rizal is to endanger it. A temporary embarrassment is nothing in
the light of eternity; the Church is 2,000 years old; it will still be standing when the
supporters of the bill are no longer around. The Senate, as it is presently composed, will not
prevail against it. Thus, perhaps, wen the thought of the churchmen. It was a calculated risk.
It was all very surprising. A month ago, one could not have imagined a Filipino politician
speaking in any but the most respectful terms of the prelates of the Church; he would have
considered it political suicide to express himself critically of them. Now all caution seems to
have been thrown to the wind. Anything goes. There is a new freedom, or, to put it another
way, license.

The Church has grown in power and influence since the days immediately following the
Revolution. Then every other Filipino leader seemed to be the critic if not the enemy of the
Church. Many had lost their faith; even among those who retained it, there were not a few
who were, in some degree, anti-clerical. The women were pious but the men were
something else. During Mass, when the priest turned around to deliver a sermon, the men
would walk out of the church; when the priest was done, they would come back. “Do what I
say, but don’t do what I do,” the men would say, referring to the man of God.

In time, many Filipino leaders returned to the Church, abjuring Masonry as in the case of
the late President Quezon; they became quite devout. It no longer seemed queer to be a
priest or to listen to one. The Church grew in prestige. When a Protestant, Camilo Osias,
made known his intention to run for president, he was told he couldn’t win; he was not a
Catholic. He could be a senator; he was. He could never be president. He must face the
facts of political life. When he wouldn’t, and bolted to the other side, he couldn’t even get
elected as senator.

If Ramon Magsaysay is president of the Philippines today, it is due not a little to the help of
the Church. The hierarchy, reluctantly coming to the conclusion that the perpetuation of the

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Quirino administration through electoral fraud and terrorism would eventually drive the
people into Communism, urged the faithful to keep the elections free. Free elections would
mean the defeat of the Quirino administration. The Church couldn’t help that. The elections
were free, and there was a new administration.

Never had the Church seemed such a power in Philippine politics! A maker of presidents, it
suddenly seemed. At any rate, a maker of senators it proved itself two years later, when
Francisco Rodrigo ran as a candidate of the Catholic Church—to be precise, the people were
made to believe he was the candidate of the Church; with no political experience
whatsoever, he polled more votes than many veteran politicians.

The Church had become a great, perhaps the greatest, political factor in the Philippines.
Catholic action had taken on a political color. This was, Catholics felt, as it should be. It is
impossible to separate politics from religion, or the practice of religion. Human life is a unity,
not a series of separate compartments. A good Catholic not only goes to the right church
but votes for the right people.

Then came the Senate bill making Rizal’s novels required reading in all schools and the
pastoral letter opposing the bill. Bishops and archbishops were suddenly being called
unpatriotic, worse than the country’s former Spanish oppressors. The political climate had
suddenly changed.

So stormy was the atmosphere that Senator Rodrigo proposed running for cover; let the
debate on the bill be held behind closed doors, he said.

Let the hearings remains public, said Sen. Lorenzo Tañada, as good a Catholic as Rodrigo.
(Rodrigo had left Tañada’s Citizens Party without even a letter of resignation to run for
senator on the administration’s ticket.) Closed-door sessions would imply that the Filipino
people were not yet prepared for democratic processes, Tañada said.

Another senator, Quintin Paredes, observed that when Rodrigo pleaded for national unity,
all he really wanted was for everybody to do his will. According to Rodrigo, Paredes went on,
there would be unity only if the bill was not passed, and no unity if it was.

“How can we instill unity when you, who advocate it, insist on enforcing your will?” asked
Paredes?

“Give to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s,” Rodrigo said.

“Then why not give Rizal what is Rizal’s and God what is God’s?” demanded another senator,
Domocao Alonto of Mindanao. The Moro senator disclosed that Rizal’s books were the Bible
of the Indonesians during their struggle for independence. He attacked Filipinos who
proclaimed Rizal as “their national hero” but seemed to “despise what he had written.”

Rodrigo hinted that “ulterior political motives” were behind the filing of the Rizal bill…
“They say that this bill was filed not really for the sake of Rizal, but for the sake of political
expediency. They say that this bill was filed to create cleavage and confusion in the ranks of
our Catholics in order to nip in the bud the growing political unity of Catholic citizens.

“I even heard some people say that the real purpose of this bill is to put President
Magsaysay in a very tight spot. If this bill, they say, passes Congress, and if the present

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controversy spreads and increases, then when this bill reaches the President for his
signature, he will be placed between the two horns of a dilemma, where he will suffer
politically either way.

“If he approves the bill, then he antagonizes a big Catholic voting sector; if he vetoes the
bill, then he alienates the sympathy and the votes of those who zealously favor the bill. And
if he does not act on the bill and just allows it to become a law, then he loses even more,
for he will be accused of moral timidity.”

Mayor Arsenio H. Lacson of Manila spoke up, denouncing those who opposed the Rizal bill as
“enemies that threaten the very foundations of our freedom.” This “new breed of Filipinos”
would, on the one hand, deny to the state the right to prescribe the books to be read in
school, on the other hand, dictate to the state what books should not be read by the
people….

“These are colonial-minded people who, fronting for their alien masters, would shackle the
minds of our youth with the fetters of artificial prejudice, of artificial ignorance, and of
artificial imbecility…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 comfort are very much alive and with us today, together with their alien
masters still as bigoted and intolerant as of old.”

Gen. Emilio Aguinaldo attacked Filipino Catholic priests for being still, according to him,
“under the yoke of the old Spanish friars, against whom the Filipinos of 1896 had risen in
arms for their tyrannies.” The government should assert the constitutional separation of
church and state. The revolutionary general recalled how Rizal’s Noli was banned by the
Spanish authorities who had kept Filipinos subject for more than 300 years under “the guise
of Christianity.” The influence of the Spanish friars was still here, according to Aguinaldo,
“despite our blood spilled on the battlefields.”

While the Philippine Public School Teachers Association, with a membership of 70,000, came
out in favor of the Rizal bill, a spokesman of the Cavite chapter of the Philippine Veterans
Legion announced that the chapter had unanimously approved a manifesto calling “un-
Filipino and morally repulsive” any opposition to the bill. The spokesman, a Catholic, said he
would stop going to church on Sundays until the bill was approved.
In the House of Representatives, Rep. Pedro Lopez of Cebu told the story of the Filipino
struggle for national independence….Filipinism asserted itself for the first time in Mactan
Island, according to him. There Lapulapu, “refusing to yield to alien imposition, slew
Magellan, thus repelling Spanish aggression.” That turned out to be “the first, the only, and
the last successful defense put up by our people throughout our history against foreign
invasion and domination….”

The congressman then hit the men of the Church:

“Nowhere in the world except here have alien educators garbed in their ecclesiastical habits
had the temerity to act as our back-seat drivers or kibitzers and publicly tell a congressional
committee what books our youth in school should not read.”

In the Senate, Sen. Claro M. Recto accused the Catholic hierarchy of being more intolerant
than the Spanish friars whom Rizal had attacked…

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“It was natural for the Spanish friars to retaliate against Rizal because he had been
unmerciless in his charges against some of them. But I can’t understand why Filipino
bishops…are now condemning his books. Without Rizal’s books, perhaps there would not be
any Filipino bishop today.”

Those who oppose the Rizal bill, Recto said, “would blot out Rizal from our memory.”

Instead of being grateful to Rizal for helping in their exaltation, they call him and his books
impious, and heretical.

When Senator Rodrigo asked Recto to point out where in the pastoral letter the Catholic
hierarchy had directly called Rizal or his books impious and heretical, Recto read the
portions of the letter accusing Rizal of having attacked various dogmas and practices of the
Church. To attack the dogmas and practices of the Church is to be impious and heretical;
the letter says that Rizal had attacked the dogmas and practices of the Church; that is the
same as calling him impious and heretical, Recto said.

Rodrigo insisted it was not the same.

“If you describe a person as constantly telling falsehoods, is that not calling him a liar?”
asked Recto. “If you call a boy the son of a woman by a man not her husband, there is no
need to say that the child is an ‘s.o.b.’”

Recto went on:

“The tragedy of Rizal is that even after his death he is being mercilessly persecuted.”
When Rodrigo said that it was not necessary to have read the novels of Rizal in order to
venerate him, that Rizal would still be a hero even if he had not written his books, Recto
quickly tore that argument to pieces. For what would Rodrigo honor Rizal if he had no
written the Noli and the Fili? When Rodrigo said, “For the suffering he had endured,” Recto
pointed out that if Rizal had not written the two books, the Spaniards would not have made
him suffer; they would not have shot him. He would not be the national hero of the
Philippines.

When Rodrigo said that the Church ban on Rizal’s books was not absolute, that a Catholic
could always obtain permission to read them if the Church was satisfied that it would not
shake his faith, Recto asked, sardonically, how the Church would go about processing the
applications of millions of Filipinos to read the novels of Rizal.

Rodrigo must have found Recto a difficult if not impossible man to debate with; again and
again, Recto would not permit Rodrigo to complete a thought, to finish a sentence; again
and again Rodrigo had to plead for the elementary right to speak; Recto kept butting in.
Never once, however, did Rodrigo lose his patience. If he lost the argument, and that would
seem to have been the verdict of the gallery which kept cheering Recto, he won the
sympathy of many who listened to the debate on the radio. He might have engaged in
sophistry, as Recto accused him of doing, but he was a gentleman every inch of the way.
Then Sen. Decoroso Rosales spoke up for those who would not make Rizal’s novels
compulsory reading in school. Those in favor of the Rizal bill would make those opposed to
it appear as unpatriotic, said the brother of an archbishop. This is unjust.

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During the Japanese occupation, the senator recalled, he and others now opposing the Rizal
bill fought the enemy. Archbishop Rufino Santos, who is against the bill, was imprisoned for
10 months in Fort Santiago by the Japanese. Meanwhile, some Filipinos collaborated with
the Japanese. Now collaborators would brand as anti-Filipino Archbishop Santos, Rosales
and others for opposing their measure. Only these collaborators, it would seem, love their
country. They have the monopoly on patriotism.

There was no answer to this, although it might have been pointed out that not all those
favoring the bill collaborated with the Japanese; there are patriots, too, behind the
measure—patriots in Rosales’s sense of the word. They fought the Japanese; they would
make Filipino students read Rizal. They fought the Japanese and now they are fighting the
Church.

Rosales warned that rather than make students read Rizal’s novels, Catholic schools
throughout the country, numbering more than 600, would close.

Recto expressed scepticism.

“They are making too much profit which they can ill-afford to give up,” said the Batangueño.
Not for a long time has the Catholic Church, or the Catholic hierarchy in the Philippines,
been subjected to such an attack. There was an anti-clerical tradition among Filipino leaders
early in the century; many considered themselves Catholics but had no use for priests. A
footnote in the Derbyshire translation of Noli Me Tangere tells us of a Fray Antonio
Piernavieja, O.S.A., who was taken prisoner by the insurgents of Cavite and made “bishop”
of their camp. “Having taken advantage of his position to collect and forward to the Spanish
authorities in Manila information concerning the insurgents’ preparations and plans, he was
tied out in an open field and left to perish of hunger and thirst under the tropical sun.”
Filipino leaders became Masons; an “independent” church was founded. Eventually, many
returned to the Church. Anti-clericalism seemed to have died out—unlike in Italy where
millions of Catholics don’t listen to priests, vote Communist. Now, here are Catholic Filipinos
speaking out against the bishops and archbishops of the Church.
The Church could have been devious. It could have pretended to make students in its school
read Rizal, but quietly prevented them from doing it. Instead, it chose to be
“straightforward.” It will not make students read the books of one it considers impious and
heretical, though he is the national hero. It just won’t. The result: a crisis, not only of
conscience for individual Catholics, but a political one for the Church.

But should anyone, after all, be made to read a book no matter how detestable he may
think it to be? How could he think it detestable before reading it?