Alumnus Jose Rizal kept in touch with the Ateneo mainly
through four men. There was Father Faura, who prophesied that he would end up
on a scaffold. There was Father Pastells, who sought to restore his Catholic
Faith by patient argument. There was Father Balaguer, who reconciled him to the
Church before he died. And there was Father Sanchez, who was his friend.
I think it can be said that these four men, each in his own
fashion, express what the Ateneo should mean, and would like to mean, to all
its alumni. The Ateneo is a school; first and foremost, it is a body of
teachers; and the essential duty of a teacher is to speak the truth. The truth
is often unpleasant, often unpopular; but the teacher, if he wishes to be
faithful to his profession, cannot afford to dilute or debase it. He must speak
the truth as he sees it, no matter how much it hurts.
Rizal had worked out during his sojourn in Spain a
thoroughgoing plan of colonial reform. Whatever Father Faura thought of that
plan, he saw at least one thing clearly – that the Spanish government would
never stand for it. Sooner or later it would try to crush both the plan and its
author. That was what he meant when he said that Rizal would end up on a
scaffold.
We could wish that Father Faura could have put it a little
less bluntly, a little more diplomatically. He might have spared Rizal's
feelings. But there are times when to spare a man's feelings is to betray his
friendship. What Father Faura said was shocking; he meant it to be. He wanted
to shock Rizal into seeing that he was faced with a choice, and that his very
life depended upon what he chose. He did not tell him what to choose. Rizal was
not a boy any longer but a man, and it was a man's privilege to choose; but it
was also a man's privilege to be told the consequences of his choice.
Rizal saw and chose; and the fact that he chose with his
eyes open, with the scaffold at the end of the road having been pointed out to
him, is his claim to be our greatest alumnus.
All of us, at some time or other in our lives, will be faced
with the necessity of making a similar decision. Beset by fears and forebodings,
we shall go to seek strength and comfort from those we miss. I do not think we
shall ever lack friends who will try to soothe us with ambiguities, who will
blur alternatives, dull the horns of a dilemma on the mistaken principle that
what we don't know won't burn us, on the childish principle that medicine
doesn't taste half as bad if taken with eyes shut.
But rare indeed is the friend who will tell us the truth;
who will pay us the supreme compliment of assuming that we are not afraid to
act on our principles. It is our hope as alumni that we shall always find such
a friend where Rizal found him – at the Ateneo.
However, it is equally important to remember that respect
for the truth must go hand in hand with respect for the individual conscience.
To force the truth on the people's minds, to ram the truth down people's
throats, is not only unjust: it is unwise. Nothing breeds error so quickly as
truth accepted under constraint. It was to be regretted that Rizal lost the
priceless heritage of the Faith; but granted the fact that he lost it, there
was only one way of restoring it to him: by convincing him, by convincing his
mind, that he had erred. There were easier ways; threats, cajolery, flattery,
the emotional argument; but Father Pastells used none of these. He chose the
hard way; he appealed to that in Rizal which was hardest, diamond-hard- -his
mind. For he knew that a faith based on anything else but conviction would be
of no use to this man who lived solely by his convictions, and who would not hesitate
to die for them.
Jesuits believe that their system of education is fashioned
to produce men of this calibre, rational men, men whose faith, while fully
supernatural, is based on reason. Whether that system actually does so or not,
is not for them to say. But this certainly can be said: that if the schools of
the free world do not produce such men in greater numbers than hitherto, that
world is doomed.
We must have men of conviction, but they must also be men of
faith. Reason can go far, but there is a point beyond which it cannot go; the
deepest questions that reason can ask, only faith can answer. It was Father
Pastells who raised these questions in the mind of Rizal, but it was Father
Balaguer who answered them. To the death cell in Fort Santiago came this simple
man, came, not with subtle argument, not with the persuasive words of human
wisdom, but with the word of God, sharp as a drawn sword, cutting deep, even to
the marrow of the spirit, cutting and healing, slaying and giving life. And the
work that the learned Father Pastells began, this simple priest finished. Yet
not he, for what are these but men? Poor, brittle instruments, of what avail
are they, of themselves, in the titanic struggle of good and evil for the
immortal soul?
No, not they, but God, in that lonely hour between dusk and
dawn, between life and death, when Rizal sank to his knees at last with a
strong cry and tears, in that lonely hour he was alone with the Alone, the man
about to die with the God who died, and lives.
What folly even to think that such a man, at such an hour,
could have been tricked into repentance! If there was trickery in the business,
God was the trickster; let them complain to God. If there was trickery in the
business, it was prayer that did the trick.
There was one man at least whose prayers were with Rizal
continually, through all the years of doubt, all the years of agony, all the
years of exile; that man was Father Sanchez. Perhaps he was to blame for
Rizal's conversion. At any rate, he was the most subtle Jesuit of them all, for
he used against Rizal's infidelity the one irresistible weapon; the power
against which nothing is proof; the power of prayer.
"More things are wrought by prayer than this world
dreams of"; and we like to think that among these good things is that
fellowship of Ateneans with the Ateneo and of Ateneans among themselves, which
not even death can break. For even in maturity, even when we are old, the
mother of our youth yet has something to offer us; yes, four things, to all her
alumni as to her greatest alumnus: the plain truth, the path of reason, the
light of faith, the love of friends.
- Horacio de la Costa, SJ
