Part Four
It is easier to pick martyrs off the streets
IF they are undeserving to become heroes, could Ninoy at least qualify as a martyr, in the secular sense of the term? Perhaps—if he died for what he believed in, according to the norm voiced by the eminent writer Nick Joaquin in A Question of Heroes. But the only person or people who could possibly shed light on this is, or are, whoever killed him in 1983—not the public, not Cory.
Only the killer/s knew why Ninoy had to die. Others can only speculate. If the motives of the killer/s had nothing to do with the causes Ninoy espoused, then he was simply just another murder victim, not a martyr.
But the late Jaime Cardinal Sin, as if he knew the motives of the killer/s for certain, had already jumped to the conclusion that Ninoy indeed died for his ideals. At the end of the one-year mourning period for Ninoy, he had declared: “We all know the ideals he died for—peace and unity throughout the land, freedom and justice for all the people.” Although it came from an archbishop, the statement is of limited value, for it is one unsubstantiated opinion, rather than a conclusive determination of the truth.
It is easier to pick martyrs off the streets, from the hovels. The Philippines has martyrs by the millions: the poor, the plebian martyr. Neither Ninoy nor Cory was ever one of them, for they were never poor. The martyr is the martyr of the involuntary kind, the victim of birth unto misery.
But the martyr is also the martyr of the voluntary type, for the martyr makes the daily sacrifice of putting body and soul to torture, to be able to maintain the family at a level approximating subsistence. If Ninoy in death was used to promote a cause—that of stirring up the people against President Marcos—the ordinary martyr also serves a cause in death, in raising little donations for the upkeep of the bereaved family while they adjust to his absence.
Now, in the religious sense, would Ninoy qualify as a martyr? In the Oxford Concise Dictionary of the Christian Church, the term is “reserved for those who had undergone hardship for the faith,” ending in death. Even among our Muslim brothers, a martyr is also one who dies for the faith.
Ninoy may have learned to be prayerful in the last years of his life, but if he ever did taste suffering, it was not for his religious faith but for his worldly misdeeds and political ambitions.
From martyrdom—the middle ground between earthly heroism and religious sainthood—let us now proceed to the proposal that Ninoy be declared a saint.
What is a saint? Among Roman Catholics, a saint is a person who has died and has been canonized by the pope. In this modern era, a candidate for sainthood often has to pass through beatification, the pope’s declaration that this person is “blessed” and may thereupon be the object of limited public veneration.
Canonization is the pope’s certification that a person’s soul has entered heaven and that he or she may henceforth be venerated as the object of a cult or devotion. As a rule, for a candidate to qualify for canonization, some prayers made for his or her intercession in heaven must be answered by what Kenneth L. Woodward, in his highly acclaimed book Making Saints, specified as provable miracles.
Miracles, Woodward said, are required by the Catholic Church as “divine confirmation of a candidate’s sanctity.” In this scientific age, the Vatican’s process of proving miracles has come to rely more on science, than on testimonials. Miracles in the form of cures, for example, must be complete, permanent, and scientifically inexplicable, as certified by doctors in Rome retained by the Church.
Do the Aquinos merit sainthood? What miracle has heaven bestowed in their names. In modern Philippine folklore, the Aquinos are credited with the miracle at Edsa, the Edsa People’s Power Revolution of February 1986.
Supposedly, in Ninoy’s name, a sea of people parted a band of mutineers from loyal government forces sent to crush the enemy. In the process, the people expelled the Pharaoh Marcos from Malacañang, while they reclaimed the land of promises. “This is the modern day version of Moses and the Exodus, in reverse,” said historians Escalante and De La Paz.
To be continued
To reach the writer, e-mail cecilio.arillo@gmail.com.