diced b Jos e S. Arc a, - non

entered the orbit of the men of the September revolution, whose "mostconspicuous representatives are the republicans, federalists or otherwise, butcertainly anticlerical and advocates of a humanist religion and even aChristianity without or against the Cliurch, basing themselves on love andcharity among men."" It was the world of the French romantics Victor Hugo,Eugene Sue, Ernest Renan, etc. brought to its final consequences. It was acomplex world difficult to assimilate for a restless young man, sensitive tothe values of religion and deeply preoccupied with his country's future, aswas Jose Rizal. Values and countervalues in that world were mixed and noteasily distinguishable from one another. Jose Jimenez Lozano, a lucid writerknown for his honesty and deep Christian faith, explains it in this paragraph,rather lengthy but which helps clarify what I mean:These men of 69, these republicans, "new Christs" and ministers of a newreligion of equality, fall like vultures on the papacy and the history of the Churchor even the Bible itself, the Old Testament above all, and of course on thecanonical and ecclesiastical discipline to underline its essential immorality.Putting it up against the moral regeneration which they offer: suppression ofslavery, women's liberation, sympathy for the needy, humane treatment ofprisoners, liberation of prostitutes, freedom of worship. Masonry is presented tothem as a theological and cultural substitute for the ancient Catholic beliefs andas a superior morality to the Catholic."The typical man of this generation is a "mystic" who will nonethelessdegenerate first into a politician and later into a sectarian, as this authoraffirms.Regrettably the Spanish Church at that time could offer no alternative atleast acceptable to the restless mind and generous heart of a man like JoseRizal. On the contrary, the Spanish Church violently rejected liberalism,dragging away with this condemnation a set of values which Rizal believedhe could not give up. "What is liberalism?" the most popular Catholicapologist of the age asked and answered immediately: "In the order of ideas,it is a totality of false concepts; in the order of facts, it is the practicalconsequence of those ideas, a totality of criminal acts."3' Being a liberal is,consequently, "a greater sin than blasphemy, theft, adultery, or homicide, orany other thing forbidden by God's law and punished by his infinitejustice."32 In the face of irreverent statements like that of the well-knownphysician Suffer y Capdevilla who, while mayor of Barcelona pronounced thefamous phrase, "man's enemies are tuberculosis and God," the mostreactionary Catholic press compared the revolution of 68 to the Muslim64