- Decision to make: Subversion, the media
- List down the countries with which we have an unfavorable trade balance.
Organize the exporters to make special efforts to export to them.
Start out with Australia. - Assign special salas or courts for cases of anti-graft, corruption, malversation, dishonesty of government officials.
- MIA [Manila International Airport]
Kearns visit – April 4-6
Include the new International Airport - Post Office – Appt. [Felizardo] Tanabe
My Own Spiritual Exercise
I asked the Lord for a sign. And he has given it. In the meditation this morning, the following thoughts were brought out.
“My job is too heavy. But your will and not mine be done.”
The permissiveness of society must be balanced with authoritativeness. The two poles must be given weight and equal importance.
Then in the Exercises – Is it for the glory of God that there be authoritativeness? Yes for we return order where there is chaos.
Father [Roque] Ferrioles [sic] spoke of recognizing the Relative of the Absolute and the Absolute in the Relative. As well as need for competence.
Spiritual Exercises on the Specific problem of Martial Law
Written below MALACAÑAN PALACE MANILA
Official Gazette for March 29, 1972: FREE from his usual schedule of callers, the President from time to time broke off from his private study and attend to unexpected callers.
In the afternoon, the Chief Executive submitted to the Commission on Appointments for confirmation the nominations of 13 officials to various posts in the Department of Labor.
Acting Secretary of Labor Adrian E. Cristobal heads the nominees.
There are certain themes that one must be sensitive to. Thus relativity.
Food is good. But meat is not always good. Thus if one has had an appendectomy, meat is not good. This is the relative value of meat.
Nor is cyanide to be taken at all. This is the absolute value of certain things to be taken.
So I conclude that freedom is not always good. There may be periods in a country’s life when it is like meat. For the time being it must be curtailed or denied.
And the permissiveness of our society has spawned the many evils that will wreck our Republic. It must now be balanced with auth0ritativeness and that is martial law. However, I put as a condition tile occurrence of massive terrorism which would alarm the people as well as the authorities.
And the discussion on authoritativeness to balance permissiveness comes incidentally in answer to some inquiry as to the problem of parents over teenaged children. The father spoke of the problem of Ateneo where in the 1960’s the authoritativeness of the decade was balanced by Ateneo with permissiveness by the Ateneo administration. And now the KM’s [Kabataang Makabayan] who profess attention and “nagwawala”—nothing is evil or immoral. This has resulted in disorder and failure in the mission to train and give competence in chemistry, economics, engineering etc. which even the KM’s with their avowed desire for a new society would need.
So Father [Jose] Cruz, our former retreat master, has instituted authoritativeness which has made him unpopular but may have saved Ateneo.
But that this should even be talked about when not in the subject of the meditation. This is the sign that I have asked of God.
Yesterday he had talked casually of the two lives of thought of reformists inside the church: First the Development – Growth. Second, Shocking, explosive.
When asked which was correct, he had answered his fellow Jesuits that both were partially valid. With respect to the first one must avoid the possibility that the waiting for growth when one does nothing is not mere indolence. And with respect to the second, that the attempt to shock is not merely giving vent to one’s natural instinct of destruction.
In my spiritual exercises I have followed St. Ignatius of Loyola’s injunction that the colloquy be an integral part of meditation. For colloquy is indeed “mental prayer”—the most direct form of prayer: “it personalizes the relationship between man and his Creator.”
And I follow the Ignatian Exercise which divide into three parts: purgative, illuminative, unitive. So the first has to do with our awareness of responsibility in Creation, the nature of sin, its degrading and disintegrating effects, the nature of divine judgment and eternal punishment.
The second deals with the divine will in the life of Christ and aims at making the retreatant want to imitate Christ. It has to do with the events in the life of Jesus Christ beginning with the Incarnation and ending with the gospel on Palm Sunday.
The third stage studies the Passion of Christ, his sacrifice, His loyalty and obedience to the Father, his love of mankind to the bitter end. “We unite ourselves with the sacrifice, offering our good intentions, our better self so to speak and we contemplate the Redemption, realizing that it was wrought by the most terrible ordeal.
I have also followed Loyola’s “The Making of a Decision” (Secs. 169-189), as well as his “Rules for Distinguishing Between Different Spiritual Influences.”