Part I
The demand now of the Left, the elitist opposition and the Church to exhume the remains of the former President Ferdinand Marcos is not really about the human rights violation allegedly committed during martial law, but part of their covert campaign to distort our history. It is designed to mould the thinking and perception of our people to maintain a positive attitude towards their former colonizers with the Church as collaborating criminal partner.
This explains why they substituted Andres Bonifacio with one who was against the revolution; branded Macario Sakay as bandit; junked the candidacy of the nationalist Sergio Osmeña, Sr. in favor of a pro-Japanese Manuel Roxas; maligned Elpidio Quirino, another nationalist, as corrupt to ensure the election of Ramon Magsaysay, a US-backed candidate; ridiculed Carlos P. Garcia for his “Filipino First policy”; accused Claro M. Recto of being a communist lackey and engineered the ouster of Ferdinand Marcos for attempting to adopt a truly Filipino ideology. These are few of the numerous chicanery committed against our leaders with the Church acting as their most reliable partner.
Today, our people’s slave-like submission to the autocratic authority of the Church, our blind acceptance of the grave economic and social inequality in our society, and the indoctrination that poverty will be rewarded in heaven is today being pursued with much vigor. Being the guardian of the outmoded system of colonialism and imperialism, the Church takes the responsibility in filtering out ideas that tend to erode the social values in what the Marxist would call the “superstructure of society.”
The issue of who should be our heroes and the icons of our resistance began on the day the Spanish colonizers planted the sword and the cross in our soil. Many of us do not know much about our Church other than its role in teaching us about God and our moral obligation to obey their moral precepts. However, a re-examination of its role, one could not help point out that the Church as an institution has committed irreparable damage to our present thinking and mortal values. The Church, as the principal instrument of foreign subjugation, has consistently betrayed our interest and that remained so today.
This explains why Spanish fortune-seeker Ferdinand Magellan was accompanied by a cleric named Pigafetta. Both wasted no time in converting the natives to Christianity. That instantly pierced an ideological hole into their consciousness. From there, they succeeded in convincing them to abandon their local gods called anitos and replace them with a Caucasian-looking one, prohibited them from practicing many of their customs and tradition to erase whatever link they have with the past, and destroyed their historical relics and native written language such that we are the only nation in Asia using the Western alphabet.
Today, the elite/oligarchy and the Church stand as jail wardens of the discredited Spanish colonialism and US imperialism. They are the enforcers of the hated polo or forced labor. It continues to brainwash our people to accept the order of things where the majority wallow in poverty and deprivation. Unfortunately, the alliance entered into by the Left with the Church resulted in the former’s political marginalization.
It is the same criminal opportunism they used to weed out suspected deep penetration agents at the height of their political frenzy. Thousands were mercilessly butchered with some even buried alive to consummate their contempt, but nobody wants to talk about that bloody episode committed by the country’s would-be liberators.
The elite/oligarchs, now mostly identified with the yellow-shirted Liberal Party, and the Church would not dare mention as human rights violation the savage murder and liquidation committed by the Communist Party of the Philippines and National Democratic Front because that would derail their agenda that only Marcos is guilty of such violation.
Notably, when the CPP created its own alter ego called the NDF on April 24, 1973, many were surprised why it was founded and headed by a renegade priest, Luis Jalandoni, who in turn is married to a Catholic nun named Coni Ledesma, also known as Sister Stella “L.” Aside from being members of the Church, both came from a prominent family of hacienderos in Western Visayas that bears the mark of what the Maoist branded as “landed gentry.”
Since that faithful alliance between the atheistic CPP and the pretending to be theist NDF, the Left and its various front organizations silently drop their anti-clerical slogan of “down with clerico-fascisms” to castigate the Church of its past conduct when it entered into an alliance with Benito Mussolini’s National Fascist Party and with National Socialist Party (Nazi) of Adolf Hitler during the Second World War while all the progressive forces fought tooth and nail against fascism.
Several priests and nuns joined the underground movement. Among them were Edicio de la Torre, Conrado Balweg, Frank Navarro, and Crescencio de la Cruz. Nothing could amplify this act of Church collaboration with the CPP/NDF than in the participation of some priests and nuns in the picket line that was often marred by violence. Significantly, Jose Ma. Sison and several other leading communist personalities were arrested inside the convents and seminaries using the place as sanctuaries.
Despite the harsh accusation about the alleged strict censorship of the “Marcos dictatorship,” the true-to-life story of Coni Ledesma a.k.a. Sister Stella “L” was made into a movie on July 11, 1984, and shown in various theaters in Metro Manila. Marcos could have prevented the showing of that subversive movie and ordered the arrest of known leftist personalities who produced the film, but he did not. On Jan. 22, 1987 while holding a peaceful assembly at the footbridge of Mendiola, 13 farmers were gunned down and scores seriously wounded. The farmers were simply demanding the implementation of the Cory Aquino promise of land reform that to date has not been fulfilled.