OUR Supreme Council officials; Commanders of the various chapters especially the organizing chapters – SSS, Quezon City and Laong-Laan; Ambassador Ludva of the Czech Republic; my brothers in the Order of the Knights of Rizal; guests; officials and employees of the SSS; friends:

I cannot thank enough our former Supreme Commander Roger Quiambao for his generous introduction.

Happy Easter to all.

I hear Dr. Jose P. Rizal also greeting us Happy Easter, but in a much louder voice – louder than what he was used to during his time. He realized that our Easter today has a far wider dimension. We need to hope for more and to have a much stronger faith for our country is divided.

Let me forthwith congratulate and commend the organizers of this symposium – the Social Security System, Laong-Laan and Quezon City Chapters of the Order of the Knights of Rizal – for initiating this activity focused on a very timely topic: Contemporaneous Rizal.

The privilege falls upon me today to speak, in the name of all, to the heart of the nation, to recite the great definition of a man whose life has become the central feature of the history of the world. It is a great national charge and duty of any Filipino to pay the noblest tribute to the memory of Dr. Jose Rizal, statesman, and reformer who, like Gandhi, espoused non-violence as the first article of faith. But he was a reformer second, a Filipino first, as he is the first of Filipinos. He was first in the hearts of his countrymen; he was second to none in nation-building. He is our national hero. No speech can contain our love for that great public man. He remains the standard by which to measure the men and women of our generation, and of the generations to come, but we cannot dare to claim him as our own, or appropriate him, unless we first become worthy of that valiant man. We become worthy of him if we can live out the national life as he did, and be heroes ourselves, illumining the hearts and minds of the Filipino with the same divine fire he carried. If we are able to take up that mighty assignment and rebuild our nation today, if we can consult his moral genius and embrace his enduring passion of God and country, we become nation builders ourselves. And so if we praise Dr. Rizal today, we, too, praise a part of ourselves. He carried no ordinary light. He was a man lit up with a peculiar, divine fire, a fire that symbolized the eternal verities that make up the very creed for every man and woman of all ages, of all nations, the living truths that strike at the chords of the beginning of humanity. He lives in the hearts of millions and he will continue to live for immemorial ages. Dr. Rizal is not just the Contemporaneous man. He is the Universal man. The latest proof to this is the recitation from memory of his Ultimo Adios by his Excellency Ambassador Ludva of the Czech Republic. Indeed, your Excellency, you are more Filipino than many Filipinos today.

In the present times the spirit of Dr. Rizal has never been more relevant. We are confronted with questions that strike at the heart of our nationhood. We are also saddled with the issues that confront us as a community of nations. Externally, we face new forms of terrorism that defy the fiction of national boundaries. There are foreign interests which renege on their promises to open markets to our exports. There are those who speak of neo-colonialism, which is domination not by the deployment of military forces but through economic muscle. In the process of globalization we face heavy and underhanded competition. We have to keep up with the white heat wave of technological change in order to survive as a people. Internally we have come across many individuals who twist the methods of government to defy the great and sacred interests that have held our democratic institutions together. There is heavy fighting in Mindanao and in other parts of the nation. There is recurring corruption, government inefficiency, and the fragmentation or disintegration of political parties culminating in vague and purposeless policies or activities. There is no real and sustained concentration on key issues – there is still too much emphasis on personal interests over national ones. There is an erosion of trust in our great institutions of government. Our revenue generation and collection is grossly inadequate to feed an exploding population and to cover basic services. The perfect majority of the Filipino people are poor. The list is by no means complete. The moral agitation we face is the same as in the time of Rizal.

In a time when we are spiritually and financially bankrupt, we will have to restate and redefine what it means to be a Filipino in light of a more integrated, interdependent world. We must turn to our heritage to form a more solid foundation for our values. Fueled by a more vibrant national conscience we can mobilize our people for a great national effort. In our bold advance to the future, we can find solace in the UNIVERSAL man that is Dr. Jose Rizal, the template of the Filipino spirit.

But our return to Rizal and all that he represents can be a difficult task. The fine memory of the past can lure us to think that our future is in safe hands. If we turn to Rizal simply to get a reflected glory, we may be tempted to rejoice in our own magnificent ruins. But we are not Rome; the future beckons – today Rizal is not an artifact just to be held up in contemporary light; rather, we must appeal to his high sense of justice to achieve a genuine, permanent, and national moral awakening without which our laws bear no meaning. We cannot look upon Rizal in passive light but we must actively take up his vision for the Filipino people. He did not see the Filipino as an isolated people. Dr. Rizal set the tone for our inevitable participation in the international cooperation between and among the great nations of the world. He did not merely define the organic sentiment of the Filipino from within, but he defined the Filipino standing from without. Never has Rizal been more relevant in the speed of the present time.

When our minds rest on Rizal we are overwhelmed by his patriotic devotion first and foremost to the silent and suffering majority who looked to him in desperate hope, by his great sacrifices to gain sovereign independence, by his efforts at reform which grew to an unstoppable international movement, and by his multi-faceted genius which fused together various disciplines coupled with an unmatched understanding of the cultures that orbited the Filipino identity. He was hailed as "The First Filipino," "The Universal Hero," "The Messiah of Redemption," the "Pride of the Malay Race" and "The Great Malayan." As political reformer, Dr. Rizal was later compared to Gandhi and Sun Yat Sen. In the path to political independence he advocated moderate social reform through legal means rather than violent revolution. Rizal was perhaps Asia’s first non-violent political reformer. He was the leader in the propaganda movement in Spain and elsewhere, actively campaigning his agenda for the Philippines in La Solidaridad and other major broadsheets. In his effort to reconstruct our heritage and demonstrate that a whole people flourished before the arrival of the Spanish colonizers, Rizal published his annotations on Morga’s 17th century historical work, Sucesos de las Islas Filipinas. He founded La Liga Filipina, perhaps his most momentous step at nationbuilding. La Liga Filipinas was to be the vehicle to advance his belief – a belief which eventually became our present-day understanding of nationalism – that the loyalty of the inhabitants at that time was tied to the archipelago and not to Spain. His writings later formed the credo for the colonies in Asia in their fight for independence. Although there had been others before Rizal who gave their lives to defend their peoples and lands, none of them were able to imbue as Rizal did in the various fragmented communities of the archipelago that high and transcendent sense of nationhood, that unifying affection that enabled all of us to rightly call each other "Filipinos," a people who shared common roots and who occupied a common territory. His martyrdom crystallized the Filipino identity. And so we say that he is the First Filipino.

But he is beyond that. As a universal man well aware of the pulse and life of the international community, Rizal knew that a concrete and robust national identity is a precondition for international discourse. He learned 22-foreign languages, mastered at least five of them, and traveled throughout Europe and Asia. He formed an international network composed of statesmen, academicians, publicists, thinkers, and influential people. He was immersed in world affairs. His analysis was not confined to Spain alone. He predicted the emergence of the United States as a world power. He predicted the formation of an independent Philippine Republic in due time. He believed in the unifying notions of humanity, regardless of religion, race or color. He believed in universal justice. He envisioned a new world order characterized by international harmony and peace among nations. The essence of his universal spirit was captured in one of his speeches: "Genius has no country, genius bursts forth everywhere, genius is like light and air, the patrimony of all: Cosmopolitan as space, as life, as God." Reformer, physician, novelist, historian, educator, and poet, Dr. Jose Rizal is not a man of the past – he is a man of the universe and certainly a man of the future. In large measure Dr. Rizal made this country. It is fitting that we, like him, continue the task of nationbuilding in our own unique way.

Nation-building is not confined to the workplace. Nation-building is a ministry, a kind of national living that dissolves the dividing lines between the public and private life. During my watch as Chief Justice, I had instituted The Davide Watch, the vision-mission of the Action Program for Judicial Reform (APJR). I envisioned a Judiciary that is independent, effective and efficient, and worthy of public trust and confidence; and a legal profession that provides quality, ethical, accessible and cost-effective legal service to our people and whose members are willing and able to answer the call to public service. The APJR today is considered by the international circles as the most comprehensive and ambitious judicial reform agenda. I have said before that under our special circumstances the duty to administer justice today – our national life – is no longer a privilege or even a duty, it is now an organic necessity. In these crushing times it is not enough to be an instrument of justice. We must be disciples of the law and fervent ministers of the temple of justice. In all our efforts at social change and reform, we are faced with the same problems that Dr. Rizal himself encountered. There are many constitutional, legal, economic, social, political, intellectual and other grave perils that bombard the public conscience, and there is an urgent necessity to wage a merciless war against them, without forgetting that the attack is made only when just and truthful. We have taken the hard and honorable route to success by choosing to stay under a government under fire. The breadth and depth of our moral dilemma today are no less severe than they were in Rizal’s times. These problems have taken on a contemporary form but they are in essence the same problems nonetheless. And since the effects of our national problems as well as our response to them go beyond the national level, there is the need for the Filipino to assume a more international outlook in the resolution of these questions. If we are to live out a genuine national life, we will realize that there is no room for selfish nationalism. We will leave no time for petty and destructive criticism. We must see, as Rizal did, the virtue in international cooperation and mutual aid. The principles that govern human relations are the same as they were then. The ethics that govern diplomatic practice between nation-states, the edicts that underwrite transnational dispute resolution, the pillars of the international justice system, are founded on natural right and justice as men of all seasons conceive them to be. The sovereign agency of a whole people acts upon the same principled and human standards that are intrinsically true and valid even though they may unsettle public opinion. In the field of international humanitarian law and human rights where the local authority itself may be culpable of high crimes, the principles of international custom and treaty law are to be applied forcibly for the sake of the greater interest of humanity, even if the administration is to suffer and change hands. In the resolution of international tension and conflict, in the negotiation for peace and aid, in the petition for developmental assistance for the less developed world, if only we can resemble the universal, unifying force that was Rizal and embrace the organic sentiments that underlie his moral genius, we become advocates of humanity. We become the standard bearers not only for the Filipino people but for the rest of humankind. We will not only survive in the relentless tide of history – we will prevail.

In our endeavor to restate the Filipino identity in the light of the times, in our attempt to inaugurate the new social order we would like our children to see, we will have to confront the inevitable pressures that bear upon our national life. In our efforts to wipe out injustice we will face many forms of persecution. This is the inevitable experience of the men and women who gloriously surrender themselves to the national life. When Rizal returned to the Philippines in the course of his international campaign for greater Philippine autonomy and independence, he was arrested. He was exiled to Dapitan. He was tried on false charges of treason and complicity in the revolution, and he was sentenced by a military court to die before a firing squad. On the eve of his execution, still holding his personal suffering with no account, he wrote his famous poem, Mi Ultimo Adios, dedicating his whole national life to his family and the Filipino people.

The great American orator Robert Green Ingersoll once said of his brother that "he believed that happiness was the only good, reason the only torch, justice the only worship, humanity the only religion, and love the only priest." Upon the grave of Rizal, who sleeps tonight beneath the wilderness of flowers, rests the organic truths of love and life. And now to you, of the Order of the Knights of Rizal, you who have been chosen, you are to look into your hearts once more and carry on the living flame Rizal once lighted there. To the youths of our beloved country, this challenges must be stronger. No matter the difficulty we face in our task to rebuild our country, if we are to be tingled by the divine fire that is Rizal, if we humbly heed the echo of his lips, if we are compelled to action by his heart to put his vision into practice, if we are to give meaning into his words, then the future I envision is not one of national prosperity by universal harmony.

To you rests the special responsibility to perpetuate his memory, to exemplify him, to make every outstanding mark of nationhood, to commend the life of others who have tread the same holy ground, and to carry his torch, his living legacy, to the succeeding generations who will remember his message and who will act and act now. In the spirit of self-surrender we must propel our national destiny to a magnificent epoch.

Dr. Jose Rizal was not just a Filipino. He belongs to all faiths and races – he belongs to the world. He belongs not to our times but to all ages. Truly he is the CONTEMPORANEOUS and UNIVERSAL man. And yet, though he belongs to all peoples, Rizal is our own, because he is the First Filipino.

Thank you.