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:
https://www.academia.edu/18657854/Medjugorje_and_the_Mad_Mouthings_of_the_Madonna_of_the_Antichrist_
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).
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).
Our Lady of Guadalupe: The Origins and Sources of a Mexican National
Symbol, 1531–1797
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.
