JOSE RIZAL AS A MASON

By Bro. Austin Craig, Manila, P.I.

(INTRODUCTORY NOTE -- I count it as one of my opportunities for Masonic service to have been able to introduce to the Scottish Rite form of Masonry Bro. Craig, the author of the following article. Past Master of a Lodge in Oregon before coming to the Philippines , he was already interested in the Craft when, about the time I was beginning to establish the Rite in Manila , I first met him. He was among the first to receive at my hands the degrees above the Third, and his continued interest in the Rite is shown by his activity in securing Letters Temporary for the new Lodge of Perfection of which he is now the Master. Combining a real devotion to Masonry with the historian's love of accuracy, a rather remarkable capacity for collecting material and an attractive literary style, Bro. Craig gives promise of becoming one of the foremost writers of the Craft. He has handed me a copy of his article--not for publication but for my own use; but I feel that it is too meritorious to be so kept, and that I ought to make it accessible to as many ass possible of our brethren of the homeland. CHARLES S. LOBINGIER.)

With all brevity and simplicity possible shall try to put before you the few particulars which I possess about what unquestionably was the greatest influence informing the character, so worthy of emulation, of that upright man and true Mason who today is being honored throughout Magellan's archipelago for having so well prepared the way for the new Philippinesdedicated to the principles of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity.

From childhood Rizal's ambition was to travel in foreign lands, probably because his mother's half brother, who had heen educated in British India , was a great traveler, and to the same uncle perhaps he owed his first idea of Masonry. There is a story that this Jose Alberto Alonso belonged to a Pandacan lodge whose master was the British Vice-Consul, the more credible that it would explain the repeated honors he received under the regency of General Prim and during the reign of King Amadeo,--an epoch so Masonic, to accept the contention of its critics, that even to a Bishop for Cebu all its appointees were sons of the widow.

But whether there was such a family predisposition, or the abusive attacks on Masonic principles current during his student days in books like "Capitan Juan" had had an effect in his case different from what their authors intended, or some other cause not yet come to light was responsible, certain it is that the late Tomas G. del Rosario, president of the Rizal Monument commission, used to tell how the martyr-hero was his companion in the famous Lodge Acacia of the Gran Oriente de Espana at an earlier age than was customary and at a time when as yet few Filipinos had been accepted into the Craft.

Rizal's Berlin associates, or perhaps the word "patrons" would give their relation better, were men as esteemed in Masonry as they were eminent in the scientific world--Virchow, for example. And so imbued was he himself with the Square men's principles that after his brief visit with Doctor Blumentritt at Leitmeritz, the Austrian professor promptly wrote the Manila Jesuite that their former pupil had "fallen into the snares of the abominable Masonic sect."

It was a young man who made no secret of his interest in the free, i.e., Masonic, countries of the world who came home to find a governor general in the Philippines who, his enemies claimed, was utterly dominated by the Masons that surrounded him. Perhaps had it been otherwise the author of "Noli Me Tangere" would not have been given as a bodyguard a Spanish army officer, Lieutenant Taveil de Andrade, who is said to have shared his views, nor have received the timely notice which enabled him to make his escape out of the country when an authority greater than the governor's threatened him.

Next he lived in London in daily association with a distinguished countryman, eminent in the law, who had been deported from Manila to Guam in 1872 and rescued thence by Hongkong brethren, but Doctor Regidor most emphatically assured me that Rizal never visited, much less belonged to, any London lodge.

*Address before Nilad Lodge, Manila , at its annual observance of Rizal Day, Dec. 30, 1915.

In 1889 his home was Paris , and there, probably through the influence of Dr. T. H. Pardo de Tavera, who was a member, in company with a prominent business man now in Manila , also a physician, he joined a French Lodge whose hall was at Rue Cadet 23. Thereafter, and Hon. Mariano Ponce is my authority, he joined the Filipino students' lodge, "La Solidaridad, " of the Gran Oriente Espanol which after years of rivalry had outlived the Gran Oriente de Espana and, under the Professor of History in the Central University, was giving special attention to Spain's backward colonies across the seas. Here he was raised to the sublime degree of Master Mason, and became an enthusiastic worker. The manuscript, in his own handwriting, of an address on "Masonry" before this lodge is still preserved in Spain , by Eduardo Lete, of Saragosse.

In November of 1891 the Tyler's Register of Vistors to St. John's Lodge, Scotch Constitution, of Hong-kong, received the signature "Jose Rizal, Temple du honeur (lodge) de Les Amis de L'Honeur Francaise" as may still be seen, and he visited several times. There were formed the friendships which permitted him so promptly to become a practicing physician in the British colony and which led, through the Hong-kong office, to the agricultural colony concession in British North Borneo.

And when the arbitrary deportation to Dapitan came, it was Frazier Smith, Pastmaster of St. John's Lodge and editor-in-chief of the daily Hongkong Telegraph, who compelled the Spanish Consul to declare for his government that the man whom the British Colony had so highly esteemed was not being ill-treated in exile. Nor should he have been with Captain Ricardo Carnicero, reputedly a member of the universal family, as his jailer.

His enemies have always attributed Masonic membership to Governor General Blanco who permitted Rizal to start for Cuba as a volunteer surgeon for the Spanish Army's yellow fever camps there, and it was his removal, through a promotion usually supposed to have been purchased by those who were not his friends but wanted a vacancy for a tool of theirs, that made possible the tragedy of Bagumbayan Field. Of Rizal's fellow passengers on the Spanish Mail steamer which took him to Barcelona, only Juan Utor y Fernandes, Thirty-Third Degree and former Grand Secretary of the defunct Gran Oriente de Espana, another brother and a Mason's son, showed even bare civility to the famous "filibusterer" till his skill as a surgeon compelled recognition.

I shall pass over the opportunities to escape, rumored to have been offered in Barcelona and again on arrival in Manila , but Rizal's return voyage from Spain as a prisoner saw an effort at Singapore , by Antonio Regidor and other brethren of London , Filipino, Spanish and English, to free him through habeas corpus proceedings. These alleged that in the Philippines Freemasons were treated as outlaws and that the prisoner was being held without any judicial process, with no prospect of fair trial and for nothing that civilization called a crime. But the mail steamer was loaded with Spanish troops and under the royal flag had to be regarded as a government vessel over which the British authorities could have no jurisdiction.

In the death cell of Fort Santiago , nineteen years and one day ago, occurred a conversation which has been reported by those favorable to one side; but the memory of the single man who made up the other side and died so soon thereafter demands scrutiny for any possible inaccuracies in this biased version. One mistake certainly was made in attributing to him the declaration that his Masonic membership was in London , an error which would shake confidence in the rest of the report without the added doubt created by having two different versions of his reputed retraction of his errors, whose original has never been seen by any disinterested person. However, had Rizal felt impelled to renounce his Masonry to free his family from further persecution or to give legal status to the woman whom those incredible times of tyranny would not permit him to marry till he had renounced his political principles, still he would have been but following the order's teaching which subordinates its claims to the duties owed to God, one's family, one's neighbors and one's self. The Mason and friend of Rizal, Pi y Margall, had vainly humbled himself to ask pardon for the prisoner in his filst vislt to the govelnment palace since he had left it as the ex-president of the short-lived Spanish Republic, and there only remained for the Gran Oriente Espanol to place in its hall a tablet to Rizal's memory as tonight the doubly worthy and worshipful Lodge Nilad is doing rlndel the symbolic name of his great novel in his native tongue he having been its honorary Master.

Do I need to recall how, since the dawning of the better day, that on the first anniversary of the Great Filipino Mason's martyrdom there were in the American Army of liberation those who paid the military tribute of reversed arms to the memory of the Philippines' addition to the long list of their brethren who in every country where light has come out of darkness have shown the way by following the example of the ancient builder and sacrificing life before integrity?

And it is too recent to need more than merest mention that a President of the United States who had studied in the same ancient school publicly declared, "In the Philippine Islands the American government has tried, and is trying, to carry out exactly what the greatest genius and most revered patriot ever known in the Philippines, JOSE RIZAL, steadfastly advocated."

Three years ago, when the government of the Philippine Islands had temporarily at its head another of our ancient and honorable fraternity the remains of Brother Dimas Alang were given more decent interment thar his predecessor in that high office of sixteen years before had accorded them, and the Rizal Monument became the Rizal Mausoleum after the belated public and Masonic funeral honors had been rendered. There in death rests the Martyr, with his story known and his memory honored by Masons wheresoever dispersed,-- another link in the grreat chain which binds together the world-wide brotherhood.