THIS may be the last time the country observes Rizal Day on December 30. The National Historical Institute supports bills moving the date from the anniversary of Rizal’s execution to that of his birth, June 19. It is more convenient because it allows students to be dragooned into forced commemorations, and allows a celebratory continuum, beginning with the Flag Days that start on May 28, flows into Independence Day on June 12, and culminates with the proposed new Rizal Day on June 19. We do not doubt the administrative convenience a shift in date represents. We object to the manner in which this law will divorce Rizal’s life—and death—from the consensus and commemoration achieved by every generation of Filipinos beginning with Rizal’s own contemporaries.

If the First Republic is viewed as the cornerstone of our national identity, then the commemoration of Rizal on the anniversary of his execution is one of the few surviving legacies of that regime, along with the flag and the anthem. That execution itself was undertaken by the Spanish in retribution for the outbreak of the Revolution in August 1896, a date otherwise unmarked since the foundation of the First Republic itself, whose leaders sought to downplay Andres Bonifacio’s revolt, invoking, as it did, too many uncomfortable questions about that republic’s leadership.

Still, the official history has been set in stone since the Diosdado Macapagal administration moved Independence Day to June 12, and we have no desire to challenge the official consensus. But if we are to respect that consensus then surely it is as valid, and even more so, because continuously observed, to retain Rizal’s commemoration on the day he was martyred.

It has often been said that Rizal’s martyrdom conferred upon him secular sainthood. Do these include the virtues of Catholicism on a heroic scale, the kind that characterized its martyrs? No. Pope Benedict XIV wrote, “In order to be heroic, a Christian virtue must enable its owner to perform virtuous actions with uncommon promptitude, ease, and pleasure, from supernatural motives and without human reasoning, with self-abnegation and full control over his natural inclinations.” Rizal devoted his life to Reason as his 19th-century generation defined it, and insisted upon it; he would have considered Christian heroism a kind of delusion, founded on superstition.

Or was it what Chris Lowney, studying the Jesuits, calls “heroic leadership”? Lowney’s book identifies four traits that set the Jesuits apart and which could reasonably describe how Rizal stood apart from his contemporaries: self-awareness, ingenuity, love, and heroism itself, in “an uninterrupted life of heroic deeds and heroic virtues.”

Martyrdom was a crowning glory for Rizal in his own eyes, the validation of his life’s work. His execution, it can be argued, was planned by him as an eternal reproach to those moving with intemperate haste to create a nation when nationhood, in his eyes, would be meaningless if the population wasn’t thoroughly imbued with reverence for the civic virtues. That is, personal habits and attitudes, as one definition puts it, that are conducive to social harmony and the well-being of the community.

Apolinario Mabini for his part said the only tribute worthy of Rizal’s memory is the imitation of his virtues. He argued that “if Rizal had not existed, somebody else would have played his role,” and in response to the grounds laid by the Spanish for Rizal’s execution, argued in turn the originally moderate demands of Rizal’s generation, “by nature slow and gentle… had become violent because obstructed.” Mabini then observed that even if “Rizal had not started the resistance, yet he was condemned to death: were he not innocent, he would not be a martyr.”

Mariano Gomez, Jose Burgos, and Jacinto Zamora in 1872, Jose Rizal in 1896, Jose Abad Santos in 1942, and Ninoy Aquino in 1986 are heroes by virtue of martyrdom. We have an intrinsic, an organic, approach to heroism. To move Rizal Day is to deny what sets Rizal apart from his contemporaries and tears us apart, in turn, from our founding generation.