A bad script with everyone involved coming out a v

If anybody had written and submitted it as a plot for one of our Pinoy movies or teledramas – or even to Hollywood which has begun to churn out the zaniest film productions, along with the excellent – the manuscript would have quickly been tossed in the Circular File – meaning, the waste basket.

Yet for the past few days, reality has put fiction to shame. What happened to "star witness" Angelo "Ador" Mawanay, his amazing "escape" to go to confession (salamabit, what religious devotion), his chastened "return" only to be officially released by the Senate, is the stuff of "Mars Invades the Earth." The ponderous rumbling and grumbling, and threatening by our Senators, too – including Jawo’s mangling of the word "propesterous", and the shrill, injured reactions of other solons to the shocking but incredible revelations of Ador (Sus, the main target Panfilo Lacson was even forgotten) – made the august upper chamber look like a football brawl between Argentina’s Boca Juniors and River Plate, the traditionally bitter soccer rivals, with everybody kicking the referee, and the fans rioting in the stands. It has been zarzuela combined with Passion Play, vaudeville, karaoke, and Midsummer Night’s Dream coupled with that strangling scene in Othello, with due apologies to Shakespeare. Nobody has emerged from the folly of this melée smelling like a rose, but rather more like fertilizer.

The most fantastic twist of all was that of Ador’s Jesuit sponsor, Father Carmelo "Tito" Caluag, S.J., rushing a letter off to the irate Senate President Franklin Drilon, apologizing for the "confusion" regarding his "request for Mr. Angelo ‘Ador’ Mawanay’s appointment for confession with His Eminence Jaime Cardinal Sin." Sanamagan! Was going to confession so urgent for the "detained" Ador that he had to be rescued from Senate confinement by two vehicles full of . . . uh, whatever they are. The Senators fumed that Ador had been sprung by two "truckloads" of ISAFP agents, but Father Caluag has explained that "there is no truth to the story that ISAFP abducted Mr. Mawanay, much less assisted in his escape, and used force to do so." He took full responsibility for the incident, which occurred, said he, because he thought the appointment with the Cardinal had already been "cleared" by the Senate and the Intelligence Service of the Armed Forces of the Philippines (ISAFP).

Another "honest mistake"?

All I can observe is that if any soldiers, from whatever unit, took part in breaking "out" Mr. Mawanay, overwhelming or bypassing the Marine guards of the Senate, this is a matter for court martial, for mutiny, "insulting" the Senate (only the media has the license to do so), or whatever. Unless, of course, Father Caluag sent two vehicles full of seminarians or Ateneo high school kids (he was principal of the Ateneo de Manila University High School).

For that matter, the apologetic Father Tito C. is not your run-of-the-mill Jesuit. He comes from a wealthy Quezon City family, drives around in a BMW, I’m told by those on the Loyola Heights campus – not necessarily on his way to confession and guidance from Cardinal Sin. Gee whiz. What was the rush for Ador to go to confession, and why to the good Cardinal? Wouldn’t a simple priest, including Father Tito, have shriven him of his "sins"? Was it a death-expectant confession or something connected with the rites of Extreme Unction?

What a funny country we are. But it hurts when we laugh.

* * *

As a product of the ratio studiorum who spent 14 years under Jesuit tutelage, from the Ateneo Grade School to Fordham University in New York, what can I say? I’ve had wonderful Jesuit professors, and others not so wonderful. Jesuits sometimes angrily disagree with each other, and, in my time, whenever we played with them on the hardcourt, some of the sainted Padres played dirty basketball. (A venial sin, requiring trips to the school clinic, not the confessional – although we students were compelled to confess "once a week" and submit a signed confession slip to prove we had done it.)

Ninoy Aquino whose heroic death anniversary we commemorated yesterday was tainted with the Jesuit "spirit", although, "like a school drop-out" (he quipped), Ninoy also studied in St. Joseph’s, San Beda, and the University of the Philippines. I remember the day I fired him from The Guidon because of his bad grammar and syntax. He scratched his head, grinned sheepishly, and went out to become a Cheer Leader. (He later joined The Manila Times, where grammar wasn’t necessary, and became famous at 17 as the youngest reporter to cover the Korean War. Anyway, the then Times Editor-in-Chief Dave Boguslav, who loved Ninoy’s cheeky attitude, "translated" all his dispatches from the war front into English.)

Ninoy was a never-say-die campus figure in those halcyon days. Why did he want so much to become a Cheer Leader? Because, he admitted without guile, he wanted to lead the Fabilion Fee in the center court in a cute uniform, with all the coeds and convent-school girls in the NCAA stands in support of the "Blue Eagles", admiring him. Well, he accomplished just that. I remember him vividly, leading the "Blue Babble Battalion" the cheering squad, in Fabilion, and "Fight, Fight, Blue and white!" and "Blue Eagle the King" as if it were only yesterday – with a blissful smile on his face.

The Ateneo students, under the great Father Henry Lee Irwin, S.J., had put on a memorable stage play about the life and death of the English martyr, Fr. Edmund Campion (S.J., of course), entitled Who Ride on White Horses. And that, in its own way, must have been one of the factors that profoundly moved Ninoy to be one of the heroes "who ride on white horses", matching Father Campion’s martyrdom at Tyburn (the priest was hanged, drawn and quartered by the English government) with a martyrdom of his own, on that tragic airport tarmac on August 21, 1983. I had tried to dissuade Ninoy from coming home to face Marcos, in a bid to convince him to return the country to democracy, saying: "They will kill you!"

And his reply was: "If I should die, then so be it (his favorite phrase). But I hope my death will move the Filipino people to stand up and fight for themselves."

I thought that Ninoy was wrong – but he was right. As we marched him to his grave, we all resolved, millions strong, to stand up and fight for ourselves.

My greatest badge of honor, I’ll always feel, is for Ninoy, over the years, to have affectionately called me "Brod", and for the privilege of having been his cellmate in military prison (in ISAFP prison, incidentally) in the maximum security compound of Fort Bonifacio. When we were released, Ninoy was to remain in solitary confinement for seven years and seven months. But his fighting spirit never dimmed.

God bless you, Ninoy. You will never be forgotten.

* * *

But back to the Jesuits. Can they be trusted?

My late father, Benito T. Soliven, was a Jesuit graduate, too. (He studied in the seminary in Vigan, Ilocos Sur, and had his ratio studiorum in Spanish, Latin and ancient Greek).

Being a second-generation disciple (and subsequently skeptic), I’m reminded of Homer’s Iliad, when the warning about bringing the "Trojan Horse" into the fortified city was voiced: "Timeo Danaos utiam et dona ferentes" (I fear the Greeks even when bearing gifts). Hope I spelled it right. The warning went unheeded, and in the night, when the "victorious" warriors and people of Troy, having celebrated with wine and frolic, fell asleep, the Greeks hidden inside the huge wooden horse descended, opened the city gates, letting the Greek host into the walled fortress, to slaughter the wine-drugged and surprised Trojans.

When the Jesuits come into the picture full of self-righteousness, I feel the same tremor of uneasiness that suffused the ill-starred Cassandra.

The Jesuits have, for centuries, been disturbers of the peace. When St. Iñigo de Oñar y Loyola, a Spanish officer crippled by a battle wound at Pamplona, turned to religion and founded the Jesuit Order in 1559 along military lines, he was called "the lame man who looks at the stars." The Jesuits have since not as often looked at the stars, as in the dark corners of the human heart. They did not even give themselves the name "Jesuit", it was bestowed on them by outsiders, probably in derision and dislike. In our own language, "switik", derived from "Hesuita", means too cunning or too clever. Well, clever they are.

In November 19, 1775, the Society of Jesus was dissolved by Rome. Their head, Father Lorenzo Ricci, was imprisoned. However, the Jesuits were "restored" in 1814.

In South America, it was the Jesuits who invented "Liberation Theology", which compared Communism with the idealism of Jesus Christ. When the Marxist Sandinistas seized power in Nicaragua, one of their leaders and later Cabinet members was a Jesuit.

Need we say more? There’s more.

This writer went to Cuba for a few months in 1960 to write a series of articles on why the "Bay of Pigs" (Bahia de Cochinos) invasion had miserably failed. A couple of days after the "26 de Julio" national day (Fidel Castro had delivered a three-hour speech in the Plaza Civica while we all wilted in the sun), we visited Fidel. (His guests of honor were Russia’s Cosmonaut hero Yuri Gagarin, and Compañero Che Guevarra). When Castro learned I had studied under the Jesuits, he boomed: "Hermano, soy Jesuita tambien!" (Brother, I’m a Jesuit Boy, too).

It turned out that Fidel Castro Ruiz had grown up under Jesuit tutelage, in the Colegio Dolores and the Colegio Belen until he went to the University of Havana for Law.

Which is probably why, when Fidel and his Barbudos came down from the Sierra Maestra mountains and seized power (sending the Dictator Fulgencio Batista fleeing for his life), one of his first acts was to expel and ban the Jesuits from Cuba.