diced b Jos e S. Arc a, - non

morally, unmasking them before a credulous people who still believe inthem:They [the friars] will be able to simulate another uprising like that of Cavite andso cut the throats of so many illustrious heads, but the blood shed will bring forthfresher and more numerous shoots. Before the catastrophe of 1872, there wereless anti-friar thinkers. ,They sacrificed innocent victims, but now you have thetender youth, women, maidens declaring themselves for the same cause. Repeatthe hecatomb, and the executioners shall have sealed their own sentence."In my opinion this is what Rizal considered his great discovery. Othersbefore him, perhaps cruder and less tactful, had publicized friar abuses in thePhilippines," but no one had dared, least of all a Filipino, to present them tothe Filipinos explicitly, repeatedly, and in such detail as a real malignanttumor, the authentic cancer that had been poisoning the soul of an entirenation until the publication of Rizal's novels" It is in this precise context, Ibelieve, that we have to posit the problem why Rizal laid the greater blamefor what happened in the Philippines on the Franciscans. Certainly we findneither in his diaries nor in his letters a single text which expressly explainsRizal's unnerving position. But keeping in mind his insistence that the factshe narrated did occur, and after verifying the extraordinary importance heplaced on the events of 1872, there can be no room for subjectiveinterpretations outside of these presuppositions.2. Cavite, Jose Burgos, and Joaquin de CoriaOne of the most conspicuous victims of the Cavite mutiny was withoutany doubt the native-boo priest, Don Jose Burgos, a man admired and deeplyrespected widely among the Filipino clergy and nation at the time.° We donot know if Rizal had met on an earlier occasion the priest whose name theyoung students of the period pronounced with deep 'respect when Rizalhimself began his studies in Manila. But what is beyond question is theadmiration the latter felt, not without a certain idealism of which he will try todivest himself later, perhaps in a rather radical way, although easilyunderstandable, given his profound inner transformation after coming intocontact with the atmosphere and culture of Europe."From what we have written in the preceding section, one can easily say,among other conclusions, that Jose Rizal was intimately convinced the eventsin Cavite, and especially the death of the native priests had been the finalresult of the machinations shrewdly engineered by the friars, and more136