Recto’s Rizal Bill

Three years ago, the Claro M. Recto Foundation launched The Recto Valedictory, a compilation of the last en speeches Recto was set to deliver in Spain had he not died unexpectedly in Rome on October 2, 1960. I book the book primarily for Nick Joaquin’s superb translation of these speeches published in parallel text with the original Spanish, thinking it would come in handy one day when I decide to brush up on my Spanish.

Today I checked my historical calendar and found out that if Recto were alive today, he would be 100 years old. A Recto Centennial Commission has been formed, and I hear that three of the projected eight volumes of Recto’s complete writings will be launched this week.

Few students today know that the compulsory Rizal course they detest so much is due in large part of Recto. In the University of the Philippines, the Rizal course is coded as PI 100, or Philippine Institutions 100, and I often hear it said that PI 100 actually means “Putang Ina 100”. I don’t blame them because the main reason I agreed to teach this course way back in 1986 at De La Salle University was I didn’t like the way it was taught to me and I had promised myself that my students will have an “alternative” way of dealing with Rizal and our past.

You cannot help but notice the resistance of students to the Rizal course on the first day of class- they make you feel how very useless they feel it is in their lives. Then add to this the prevailing lie that Rizal was made national hero by the Americans over Bonifacio. This is why I open my classes with a lecture on how Recto fought tooth- and nail to get the Rizal bill passed into law in 1956. Since Recto is very much a nationalistic icon, students stop grumbling and begin to listen.

I usually try to recreate the excitement that accompanied the debates and hearings on the Rizal Bill: the verbal jousts, the hecklers in the gallery (pro-Rizal of course), the rising blood pressures and fistfight in Congress between two hotheaded representatives. When students see Recto in the History of the Rizal course, they shut up and feel sorry they even thought of playing with the acronym PI 100.

We do not remember how some members of the Catholic hierarchy found 170 passages in Noli and 50 in Fili offensive to the Catholic faith. They reaffirmed that Catholics could read selected passages from Rizal’s work, but to compel Catholics to read Rizal’s novels in its unexpurgated version was to force heresy on them and violate their freedom of conscience.

Students who read Rizal’s novels today cannot understand what all the fuss was about. It is funny to think that in 1956 the very same obscurantism that banned Rizal’s book in 1887 was still operative.

Catholic schools threatened to close shop if the Rizal Bill was passed. Recto calmly told them to go ahead so the State could then nationalize them. Some church bigwigs even threatened to “punish” erring legislators in future elections, but Recto was undaunted. Here is a man willing to risk losing votes because of his principles; this is why I admire Recto so much.

There was a proposal to use “expurgated” novels as textbooks, with the “unexpurgated” copies to be kept under lock and key in the school libraries and to be used only at the discretion and/ or approval of higher school officials. Recto threw this out. He didn’t want an adulterated Rizal Bill:

The people who would eliminate the books of Rizal from the schools.... would blot out from our minds the memory of our national hero... This is not a fight against Recto but a fight against Rizal... Now that Rizal is dead and they can no longer attempt at his life, they are attempting to blot out his memory.

I think our problem is our short memories and our resistance to history courses. I wonder if m generation will be as emotional about Rizal and his works in case there is a move to abolish the Rizal course again. Maybe not.

The bill was passed with a clause that would give exemptions to those who feel that reading Rizal’s novels would damage his or her faith. One can go to the Department of Education with an affidavit attesting to one’s brittle faith and get an exemption- not from the Rizal course that you still have to take – but from reading the novels of Rizal. I usually tell my students that to my knowledge, no one has yet availed of this exemption, and if they are too lazy to read, they can always use this loophole in the Rizal Bill. Thus, far none of my students has even tried.

To give an idea about the type of people Recto was up against; here are excerpts from an archbishop’s letter banning Rafael Palma’s Biografia de Rizal. The good archbishop said Palma’s biography was

...depreciatory of institutions of Catholic Church and pernicious to the spiritual health of the faithful especially the youth of both sexes for whom the book has been approved and introduced in public schools as home reading... we hereby prohibited under pain of sin and canonical sanctions the reading, keeping or retention of the same whether in the original or in translation in the Archdiocese of Manila Cebu.

Source: Rizal Without Overcoat by Ambeth R. Ocampo