God, who created the clay for the vessel of humanity, deposited in that vessel the happiness of his grace, giving to understand his infinite will that matter will have to adapt to the transcendence of things, in order to establish, under the protection of piety, the equilibrium of love.
It is explained, by the art of affection, that the evocative figures of the supreme have emerged to the light of the world; figures, in their greatest line, that have suffered the obstinacy of the song: poets, liberators, martyrs and saints.
To the category of the poets belong the liberators, the martyrs and the saints, and thus measured in a key of resonance, it is not to be doubted that detachment seizes all of them, who are like wandering kisses of God.
Renunciation seizes them. In what exists a turn of imagination, a lightness, they renounce the barrier of matter and reach with the grace of the spirit. They ascend more the more the pain sinks its goad into the entrails of life and they manage to become ecstatic, redeem themselves, emancipate themselves from the temporal, conquering the bittersweet fruit of the apostolate.
For the souls that overcome the asphyxia of the ephemeral, the apostolate is a goal. In it the effort is recreated, transmuting itself into harmony. The apostle is a perfect music, and hence it is only lawful to compare the spirits of light in a plane of sanctity.
However, matter will not shun the comparison. Inclined to weight and measure, its nature forms number, supplying tangible angles. Matter is almost always a tangent through which the breath of life escapes to occupy its space of infinity.
This does not mean that the spirit of the apostle lacks infinity, while the claw of matter imprisons it; infinite it is and will be, and, consequently, its mission consists in embellishing its vessel of clay, with the splendor of its halo.
In this explicit case, the apostle is obliged by the supreme law to sacrifice himself positively, since the squandering of his beauty will cause the world the pendular movement of death; instead of constituting the touchstone of fecundity, it will be transformed into a negative force, which drags and floods; and what it intends to save with its example, will conclude in disaster, victim of its own spiritual whirlwind. It is imposed, therefore, the foresight, the angelic tact of the anointed, so as not to sacrifice -when being sacrificed for the sake of an idea- what of saintly we protect with the crown of martyrdom. And that protection takes root from the moment that the apostle renounces passivity, doing honor to the artistic sense of his work, because in the positive of the action finds effect the cause of the apostolic virtue. Action, action, there you have the martial step of beauty.
And it is not that there is no action in the penance of a man who fasts. The stoicism of Professor Clemente Pereda acts with mastery when declaring a Holy Week of fasting, when impiety propitiates its bitter food. That man acts individually, while he tastes the pain of all and cleans the sweat of Puerto Rico with the promise fulfilled of his virtue. He acts against the felony of the henchmen, and illuminated with hope, traces for the youth a course of heart. He acts with a Nazarene step and his attitude instills envy in the bronze that was not born with the figure of the liberators.
It is the eloquence of the Homeland. Those who apostrophize it, for the pleasure of rolling yoked to the golden chariot of gluttony, do not know it. But he, who constitutes an admiration for history, couples his matter to the transcendence of things, overcoming himself in the insurmountable. Little does the conduct of evil matter, nor does the baptism of good descend on the skeleton of the world, like a rain of freedom.
Those who corner the body of the homeland, desiring to devour it, will not be able to oppose the impetus of the supreme law. While they, sated with unconsciousness, daub their hands with the glitter of the perquisite, and bless the chains that darken contemporary civilization, the finger of God continues to point out the destiny of the peoples. While they candidly accept ANNEXATION (statehood) repudiating the postulates of International Law, which recognizes in it a collective suicide, and tarnishes public and private law and the name of the Nation, by virtue of which no one is in the right to be a slave and much less in the right to violate anyone, enslaving their body and their soul; while they violate human and divine laws, occupying the detestable position of the highest treason. Puerto Rico will continue its triumphal march towards the glory of its INDEPENDENCE.
To carry out that march of miracle until measuring the faith of the men who suffer in the name of freedom; and understanding their sacrifice, until each man crystallizes in his heart the figure of the apostle. It is not lawful to expect others to sacrifice themselves when we lack the will to overcome the sacrifice with weapons in hand. The time has come in which each Puerto Rican is in the duty to be an apostle of his own moral ignition.
Professor Clemente Pereda began the mass of hunger on March 24 and will rise from his torment on Holy Saturday. We cherish the sweetest hope that he will rise from his calvary gloriously, and for this reason the Puerto Rican Nationalism, depository of the faith of the liberators of America, announces to the Nation that on that day of Resurrection, March 31, -holy in the annals of the Church and in those of the Homeland- Puerto Rico is in the sacred duty to render its homage to Professor Pereda, demonstrating thereby that the grace of God sustains those who savor the crust of hunger, having as emblem the cult of Liberty.
At 6 a.m. on March 31 -the day on which Professor Pereda will gird himself with the glory of having concluded his voluntary penance- all the delegations of the Nation will concentrate in the Plaza de Armas of this capital of San Juan Bautista de Puerto Rico and it is hoped that the act will take on all the majesty of a holy Resurrection.
Given in San Juan Bautista de Puerto Rico on the 28th day of March 1934, the Sixty-sixth year of the Proclamation of the Republic. Puerto Rican Nationalist Party National Board P. ALBIZU CAMPOS President JOSE LAMEIRO General Secretary