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In 1521, Spanish conquistadors took possession of Mexico, then inhabited by the Aztecs, and organized the Christianization of this indigenous population.

 

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From December 9-12, 1531, Juan Diego, a native Mexican who converted to Christianity, allegedly received a visit from Our Lady near a spring of water on Tepeyac (which means "hilltop").

 

 

According to tradition, the image of Our Lady portrayed as a young woman with indio eyes and skin was miraculously imprinted upon the man's cloak (tilma in the local Nahuatl language), which is still displayed for the veneration of the faithful in the Basilica of Guadalupe. The Virgen Morenita, i.e., “mestizo,” is still considered the national symbol of Mexico, born of the fusion of Indian and Hispanic elements.

 

 

Ever since the feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe (which falls on December 12) was included in the Catholic liturgical calendar in the 18th century, it can be said that there has been a de facto approval of the “apparition” by the Church, which also lends credence to the belief of the image's miraculous origin.

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In 2014, on the feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe, Pope Francis declared:

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The Holy Mother of God [...] mysteriously left her sacred image imprinted on the tilma [cloak] of her messenger...

[Eucharistic Celebration on the Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe: Homily of His Holiness Pope Francis, Vatican Basilica, Friday, 12 December 2014]

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On July 31, 2002, John Paul II canonized Juan Diego.

 

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However, it's extremely interesting to reconstruct what happened before the canonization, and we're able to do so thanks to the original documentation published in 2002 by Father Manuel Olimón Nolasco, founding professor at the Universidad Pontificia de México, as an appendix to his critical book La búsqueda de Juan Diego.

 

 

On February 4, 1998, as Juan Diego's canonization process was coming to a close, Father Guillermo Schulenburg, abbot of the Basilica of Guadalupe for thirty-three years, wrote, in collaboration with the basilica's head priest, Carlos Warnholtz, and Father Esteban Martínez de la Serna, the basilica's librarian and former superior general of the Missionaries of Guadalupe, a confidential letter filled with concerns to Msgr. Giovanni Battista Re, Substitute for General Affairs of the Secretariat of State of the Holy See.

 

 

The letter points out, in a reasonable tone, that the Congregation (now Dicastery) for the Causes of Saints did not take into account the fact that in academic circles, “there are very serious doubts about Juan Diego's very existence” and, therefore,

 

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they should have considered a few of the numerous historians of recognized authority in Mexico's colonial history. In fact, there are many historians in the Mexican Republic, the United States, Britain, Spain and Germany, etc., who could have brought their research findings to the aforementioned Congregation to corroborate the evidence of Juan Diego's existence or nonexistence.

[Manuel Olimón Nolasco, La búsqueda de Juan Diego, Plaza y Janés, 2002, pp. 140-141]

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The point of view of the clergymen who criticized the manner in which Juan Diego's canonization process was conducted was the same as those who considered the Guadalupe belief a legitimate traditional practice through which to pay homage to Our Lady, but found it unacceptable for a pious devotion of dubious historical truth to be presented as historical fact. 

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The three received “no response, either official or unofficial” [ibid., p. 163], but the following spring, the Congregation for the Causes of Saints established a historical commission consisting of three Mexican priests: Eduardo Chávez, José Luis Guerrero and, as chairman, Fidel González, Professor of Church History at the Pontifical Urbanian University in Rome.  

 

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With incredible speed, “the findings of this work [...] were presented by Father Fidel González at an assembly of the Congregation for the Causes of Saints, convened ad hoc in November 1998.” [F. González, E. Chávez, J. L. Guerrero, El Encuentro de la Virgen de Guadalupe y Juan Diego, Porrúa, 2001 (4 ed.), p. 7].

 

 

A few months later, the work was published in El Encuentro de la Virgen de Guadalupe y Juan Diego. Its conclusions can be summarized by the following:

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Whether the sources are Indigenous or Spanish, they show us that from the beginning of the second half of the sixteenth century, valid historical elements about the apparitions and the person of Juan Diego have existed.

[Father Willi Henkel, in Eduardo Chávez, Our Lady of Guadalupe and Saint Juan Diego. The Historical Evidence, Rowman & Littlefield, 2006, p. xxxv]

 

 

Considering that, according to tradition, Juan Diego died in 1548, this means there's at least agreement that, regarding the apparitions, there are no documented references dating back to the time in which the alleged visionary was alive.

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Two days before the canonization ceremony, Archbishop Edward Nowak, Secretary of the Congregation for the Causes of Saints, when interviewed by the newspaper, Il Tempo, summarized the situation in the following way:

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There have always been significant doubts regarding the existence of this saint. We have no documented evidence; only clues, which the Vatican Historical Commission later deemed sufficient for proving that Juan Diego existed.

[David Murgia, L'Arcivescovo Nowak: "Sulla esistenza non ci sono prove", Il Tempo, July 29, 2002, p. 5]

 

 

One wonders, then, how the “practice of heroic virtue” (a condition for canonization) could be ascertained in a person whose existence is barely believed to have been proven.

 

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Mariologist Father René Laurentin wrote:

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The Pope raised him [to the glory of the alters] according to the abbreviated rite that authenticates a reputation for holiness, traditionally established among God's people through the sensus fidelium...

[Laurentin, p. 91]

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In other words, while a “reputation for sainthood” is typically only a precondition for the initiation of the canonization process, for Juan Diego, it was based solely on the reputation for sainthood, inferred from documents dating back to a time when he was not certain to be alive.

 

 

Above all, they relied on indirect testimony from a canonical trial organized by the cathedral chapter of Mexico City to be granted the establishment of the liturgical feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe by Rome, 117 years after Juan Diego's alleged death.

 

 

We're referring to the Informaciones Jurídicas de 1666, which Don Eduardo Chávez calls “one of the key documents establishing Juan Diego's personality” [Chávez, p. 34].

 

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According to ​Chávez, "these Informaciones, though they are from 1666, cannot be considered as a late source since they gather testimonies of old Indigenous(some of them more than 100 years old), who remembered what their families and close friends used to tell them" [ibid.].

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The most noteworthy statements were made in the Náhuatl language by some very elderly Indian devotees (who in several cases, were unaware of their exact age) and translated into Castilian.

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These witnesses recounted what, 70-100 years earlier, they were told had happened some decades earlier. 

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The least that can be said is that these are not the ideal sources from which to draw a complete and objective profile of Juan Diego, should he have existed at all. 

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From the Spanish Guadalupe to the Mexican Guadalupe

 

Guadalupe represented the first alleged Marian apparition to occur outside the (until then) usual geographic context (of Europe and, in the very rare non-European cases, the Mediterranean basin).

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Our Lady, appearing 1531 in Mexico, reportedly said that “she wanted to be called Our Lady of Guadalupe" [Laurentin, p. 363].

 

 

This is quite remarkable.

 

 

Since the late Middle Ages following an alleged apparition, Our Lady of Guadalupe was venerated in the Royal Monastery (then governed by the Hieronimites) in the Spanish city of Cáceres in Extremadura.

 

 

It was from the poor region of Extremadura that a considerable number of conquistadors came, beginning with Hernán Cortés, the military commander who led the bloody conquest of Mexico in 1521 and from 1522 was governor of New Spain (as the Mexican territory was then called).

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Speaking of “conquistadors and missionaries” who came to Mexico, the historical commission acknowledges:

 

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The devotion of many of them to Our Lady of Guadalupe of Extremadura, Spain is undeniable. Many of them came from that region of Spain.

[González, Chávez, Guerrero, p. 14]

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Peter Boyd-Bowman, Professor of Hispanic Linguistics at Buffalo State University of New York, attests:

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Nearly 80 percent of America's white settlers in the 16th century were Andalusian, Extremaduran and Neo-Castilian, i.e., natives of the southern Iberian Peninsula.

[Peter Boyd-Bowman, Brotes de fonetismo andaluz en México hacia fines del siglo XVI, "Nueva Revista de Filología Hispánica", Vol. 36, no. 1, January 1988, pp. 75-77]

 

 

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​Several internal elements also point to the apparent derivation of the Mexican Guadalupe from the Spanish Guadalupe, which, moreover, as admitted by all, is based upon "legend".

 

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The story of the Spanish Guadalupe, conforming to well-known medieval legendary narrative patterns, circulated orally for several decades and was then put into written word by several “Hieronimite monks who drafted an account of the apparition in the years 1400-1440" [Laurentin, p. 361].

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According to legend, in a mountainous region of Extremadura (the Sierra de las Villuercas) near the Guadalupe River, a shepherd (later to be known as Gil Cordero) sees one of his dead cows resurrected and soon after, Our Lady appears to him:

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Go to your town of Cáceres and tell the priests and clergy of that church what you saw, tell them I said to come to the place where you found your dead cow which I brought back to life and there, next to the large rocks, dig with an unwavering reverence, and underground they'll find an image of me, and in the exact place where they find it, let them make a chapel in remembrance of me.

[Gabriel de Talavera, Historia de Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe, consagrada a la soberana magestad de la Reyna de los Ángeles, milagrosa patrona de este sanctuario, Toledo, Tomás de Guzmán, 1597, I, ch. I, f. 14]

 

 

When the shepherd arrived home, he found “his wife weeping bitterly, telling him that his son had died” [ibid., ff. 14-15], but when the priests arrived for the funeral, “the deceased, in the presence of everyone, stood up” [ibid., f. 5], and the pastor said, “Rest assured that the miracle that occurred in your presence comes from divine will, so that you may believe what I wish to report to you on behalf of the Sovereign Princess” [ibid.]

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