Wednesday, April 17, 2019

Juan Diego and the tilma image


 Image result for tilma and juan diego



 

by

 

Damien F. Mackey

 

 

“In a post-conciliar era which featured the excising of certain saints from the Church's official calendar of saints, the proposed action of canonizing Juan Diego seemed to resurrect the historical peccadilloes of previous centuries. Canonizing Juan Diego, they argued,

would be akin to canonizing the Good Samaritan. Some pro-apparitionist interlocutors impugned the anti-apparitionists' motives as racist”.

 

 

As a Catholic, Marian devotion (to Mary) is an essential aspect of my piety and prayer life.

A New or Second Adam (1 Corinthians 15:45), Jesus Christ, would seem to necessitate also a New Eve. See e.g. my article:

 

Necessity of Virgin Mary

 


 

And, although the Church does not command that we follow any private revelations:

 

“When the Church approves private revelations, she declares only that there is nothing in them contrary faith or good morals, and that they may be read without danger or even with profit; no obligation is thereby imposed on the faithful to believe them”….


 

I have accepted as authentic and cosmically significant the Marian revelations of both Fatima and Lourdes. In fact, I gave up professional work as a Librarian at the University of Tasmania in 1976 to join a Fatima apostolate (“Fatima International”) in Canada and the US.

And I have long accepted, together with Fatima and Lourdes, the apparition to Juan Diego at Tepeyac in 1531 by Our Lady of Guadalupé, whilst vehemently rejecting unapproved apparitions, such as Garabandal, Bayside and Medjugorje. See e.g. my multi-part series:

 

Medjugorje and the Mad Mouthings of the ‘Madonna of the Antichrist’

 

commencing with:

 


 

I have also written a book on Fatima:

 

The Five First Saturdays of Our Lady of Fatima

 


 

Lately, though, with my view of the Cortesian Conquest of Mexico being historically impossible and derived from a concoction of ancient people and events, see e.g. my multi-part series:

 

Alexander the Great and Hernán Cortés

 

commencing with:

 


 

and also my multi-part series:

 

Hysterical AD 'History'

 

commencing with:

 


 

then I have had seriously to reconsider as well Juan Diego whose historical background was, supposedly, this very Conquest of Mexico.

Coupled with all this are some strong arguments against the authenticity of Juan Diego, especially those raised by Fr Stafford Poole (CM).

We read, for example, this review of Fr. Poole’s book, by Jalane D. Schmidt:


 

The Guadalupan Controversies in Mexico. By Stafford Poole


 


“Mexico was born at Tepeyac,” says an aphorism about the legends surrounding the apparition of the Virgin of Guadalupe to a poor Indian neophyte named Juan Diego. But senior historian Stafford Poole disputes the historical veracity of these apparition narratives and their subsequent embellishments.

Poole previously penned Our Lady of Guadalupe: The Origins and Sources of a Mexican National Symbol (University of Arizona Press, 1995), which, with David Brading's more recent Mexican Phoenix: Our Lady of Guadalupe (Cambridge University Press, 2001), offers the most authoritative English-language historical reckonings of the origins of the cult. The Guadalupan Controversies is written for specialists of Latin American religious history, and offers a historiographical account, from early colonial-era New Spain to present-day Mexico, of the scholarly disputes, ecclesial politics, and journalistic imbroglios surrounding the investigation and promotion of devotion to Mexico's national patron, the Virgin of Guadalupe.

Poole's book highlights controversies among elites, and his reliance upon clerical sources eclipses attention to the popular role in the cult. Of course, there is no shortage of theological and anthropological interpretations of the popular cult, and in any case, the presumed autonomy of “popular” from “elite” devotions should not be too sharply drawn. But Poole could have included an analysis of the lay devotions that also played a part in the Guadalupan controversies that the book examines. For instance, Poole gives scant attention to the early colonial-era objections of Franciscan missionaries to the “new” Marian devotion under the name of Guadalupe at Tepeyac (40). Franciscan friars in the 1550s denounced the “false miracles” attributed to the shrine's Marian image, which was reportedly painted by a local Indian artist. Fray Bernardino de Sahagún deplored as “idolatry” the fact that Indians flocked to Tepeyac—a site that, according to Sahagún, had formerly hosted festivals dedicated to Tonantzín, an indigenous goddess (210–212, 216). Unfortunately, such reports appear only in an appendix written by another historian, and Poole does not examine these data—other than to caution readers against collapsing these sixteenth-century accounts of Marian devotion at the Tepeyac shrine with the apparition legends that emerged a century later (172). Guadalupan devotion, Poole maintains, originated with the circulation of seventeenth-century apparition legends that were written by clergymen (ix).

The history of devotion to Our Lady of Guadalupe, as Poole's book amply documents, is replete with initiatives from the church hierarchy (201), rather than being the chiefly bottom-up development that is often imagined. One of the most important clerical nudges came with Luis Laso de la Vega's 1649 publication of the Nahuatl document known as the Nican Mopohua, which reported a previously “forgotten” 1531 apparition of the Virgin of Guadalupe to a humble Indian neophyte named Diego (5). Laso de la Vega's mid-seventeenth century account was clearly aimed at an indigenous audience, and reported that the 1531 apparition had spurred the conversion of many Indians. The problem for historians such as Poole is that, prior to 1648, no archival source—whether written by Mexico's first archbishop, Zumárraga (to whom Diego supposedly appealed in 1531), or by his ecclesial successor (a known champion of Guadalupan devotion in the 1550s), nor any documents left by the Spanish viceroys and their coterie of colonial administrators, nor writings by the prolific Dominican “defender of the Indians” Bartolomé de las Casas, nor the fervent Franciscans on the lookout for dubious miracles—mentioned the report of a Marian apparition at Tepayac or anywhere else in New Spain. Furthermore, the data do not demonstrate a spike in native conversions, but rather depict an evangelization process that was sporadic in nature: while baptism eventually became widespread in many Indian communities, this was not necessarily accompanied by a wholesale “conversion” of indigenous religious practice and orientation (120, 198–199). ….

 

Then there is this question and answer set:


 

Question: I have been challenged by a Catholic regarding the supposed miracle of "Our Lady of Guadalupe"


 

March 1, 2010

TBC Staff

 

Question: I have been challenged by a Catholic regarding the supposed miracle of "Our Lady of Guadalupe" and the image of the Virgin Mary that appeared on the cape of the peasant Juan Diego. They said that the endurance of this account and Diego's canonization by John Paul II (July 31, 2002) is evidence enough of the truth of this story. What do you say?

 

Response: Even those described as devout Catholics have long questioned "Our Lady of Guadalupe." The head of the Spanish Colony's Franciscans, Francisco de Bustamante read a sermon in 1556 before the Spanish Viceroy and the Royal Audience. Bustamante disparaged the origins of the image and contradicted Archbishop Alonso de Montúfar's previous sermon of two days earlier. Bustamante stated: "The devotion that has been growing in a chapel dedicated to Our Lady, called of Guadalupe, in this city is greatly harmful for the natives, because it makes them believe that the image painted by Marcos the Indian is in any way miraculous" (Stafford Poole, Our Lady of Guadalupe:The Origins and Sources of a Mexican National Symbol, 1531-1797. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1997). The name "Marcos" may have meant Marcos Cipac de Aquino, an Aztec painter active in Mexico when the icon first appeared.

The fourth viceroy of Mexico, Martín de León, a Dominican, condemned the "cult of the Virgin of Guadalupe" in 1611 as a syncretized worship of the Aztec goddess Tonantzin (Ibid.). Catholic missionary and anthropologist Bernardino de Sahagún agreed with de León's judgment, writing that the Tepeyac shrine, although popular, remained a concern because shrine visitors called the Virgin of Guadalupe, "Tonantzin." Sahagún recognized that some worshipers believed "Tonantzin" meant "Mother of God" in the native Nauatl language, but he pointed out this was simply not true.


The existence of Juan Diego (the Spanish equivalent of "John Doe") is also suspect. During the 1800s, Mexico City Bishop Labastida appointed historian Joaquin Garcia Icazbalceta, another devout Catholic, to investigate.

Icazbalceta's confidential bishop's report clearly doubted the existence of Juan Diego (Joaquin Garcia Icazbalceta, "Juan Diego y las Apariciones del Tepeyac," Mexico City: Publicaciones para el Estudio Cientifico de las Religiones, 2002, pages 3-8). David Brading of Cambridge University (among others) points out that the image of the virgin was supposed to have been miraculously imprinted on Juan Diego's cape in 1531 (Steinfels, "Beliefs: As sainthood approaches for Juan Diego, some scholars call his story a 'pious fiction,''' New York Times, July 20, 2002). Nevertheless, the first recorded mention of the image of the Virgin of Guadalupe doesn't appear until 1555 or 1556.

Further, Stafford Poole of Los Angeles, another Catholic historian/priest, points out that Juan Diego himself doesn't appear in any account until 1648 (Stevenson, "Canonization Of First Indian Saint Draws Questions In Mexico," Associated Press, 7/1/02), the date when Miguel Sanchez, a Spanish theological writer in Mexico, mentions Diego in his book The Apparitions of the Virgin Mary.

Father Poole stated in Commonweal, a Catholic biweekly, "More than forty documents are said to attest to the reality of Juan Diego, yet not one of them can withstand serious historical criticism'' (Vol. 129, June 14, 2002).

 

Whilst Stuart M. McManus will write: https://doi.org/10.1215/00182168-7288182

 

Our Lady of Guadalupe: The Origins and Sources of a Mexican National Symbol, 1531–1797

 


Stuart M. McManus

University of Chicago

Search for other works by this author on:



Hispanic American Historical Review (2019) 99 (1): 160-162.

 

Originally published in 1995 at the height of the controversy surrounding the beatification (1990) and eventual canonization (2002) of Juan Diego, Stafford Poole's study of the historical evidence in both Spanish and Nahuatl for the apparition of Our Lady of Guadalupe to Juan Diego in 1531 is now available in a revised edition. As well as showing definitively that the standard account of the apparition was an invention of the mid-seventeenth century, Poole also makes a number of other important claims. Despite Bernardino de Sahagún's statement that the Virgin of Tepeyac was dangerously pagan, she was, Poole argues, not a syncretic product of a European Marian devotion and the pre-Columbian cult of Tonantzin (if this word ever referred to a particular Mesoamerican deity at all). Furthermore, the devotion to the apparition story was largely restricted to the ethnically Spanish, not the indigenous population. In other words, the real early modern Guadalupe was not the mestizo mother of the nation that modern Mexican popular religion, the church hierarchy, and the historiography have made her out to be.

 

As in the original edition, from which this revised edition differs only in the addition of a new introduction, the occasional discussion of a new document, and updated bibliographical references (including citations of the important work of David Brading and Jeanette Favrot Peterson), the focus throughout is on the precise evidence for the apparition and the relationship between the cult and the rise of creole patriotism. This means that those looking for an introduction to the life and times of the antiquarians and ecclesiastics who helped build and then eventually began to critique the apparition story should look elsewhere. The focus here is on the precise content and significance of the surviving documentation.

 

When compared to the original edition, the main novelty is the new introduction, a significant proportion of which is taken up with a demolition of the work of Richard Nebel, Serge Gruzinski, Timothy Matovina, and a number of Mexican theologians and ecclesiastics (including Cardinal Norberto Rivera Carrera), whom Poole takes to task for either their blinkered piety or their uncritical acceptance of standard narratives about the apparition. He also dismisses as a “clumsy forgery” the Codex Escalada, a purportedly sixteenth-century document signed by Sahagún and Antonio Valeriano (who many claim wrote the Nican mopohua) brought to light by a Mexican Jesuit in 1993 (p. 14). In this jeremiad against historical credulity and devotional works masquerading as serious history, Poole does, however, find time to praise the work of Xavier Noguez, Ana María Sada Lambretón, and, to some extent, David Brading.

If the book were written de novo today, it would no doubt take a fuller account of the archival work of Cornelius Conover on Mexico City's eighteenth-century cabildo and the recent reframing of the creole patriotism debate by Peter Villella, Tamar Herzog, and me. Indeed, on the latter subject, while Poole makes clear that the devotion was largely restricted to those who claimed and were assigned an identity as Spaniards, the book has a tendency to fixate on the role of a supposed nascent Mexican identity in the formation of the apparition myth. This is a historical development that Poole rather takes for granted, in contrast to the current scholarly consensus that such a historiographical framework can all too easily blend into teleology. While the creole authors discussed in the book certainly celebrated the specific “Mexican” location of the apparition, echoing and citing the words of Psalm 147 (“non fecit taliter omni nationi”), the connection between any embryonic political identity and the gradual rise of the Virgin of Tepeyac is not as self-evident as Poole makes out, which leads him to neglect important countervailing evidence. For instance, he dismisses the foundation of a Guadalupan congregation in Madrid by Philip V in 1743 as an aberration: “Why a criollo devotion would have appealed to a Spanish king is not clear, unless it was an attempt to blunt its political potential” (p. 5). If the book were written today, it would probably also include discussions of the devotion in the Philippines, where it had a significant following among both the Novohispanic diaspora and peninsular missionaries like Gaspar de San Agustín. Considering the historiographical context in which it was written, however, the book as it stands is unimpeachable.

 

In sum, Poole's account remains required reading for all historians of early modern and modern Mexican religion, society, and culture. This revised edition represents the single most comprehensive and most thoroughly researched work on the origin of the apparition story and the rise of what would become a lodestar of Mexican and Chicano culture. This book is the product of a lifetime of careful scholarship and is likely to last several more.

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