When our national hero, Jose P. Rizal, stated in his letter to a friend in 1889 that "had it not been for 1872" --the year the militant Fathers Jose Burgos, Mariano Gomez and Jacinto Zamora, who relentlessly pursued the issue of secularization and Filipinization of parishes, were garrotted publicly as a result of unjust implications hurled against them as leaders of the Cavite mutiny--he would not have known that a racial bias existed which would make it impossible for him to enter the religious life, and which moved him and other reformists to clamor for reforms.
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