The Miracle of the Lady of Guadalupe
In the Bible in the book of Matthew 28:19–20, Jesus Christ says:
“Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you.”
His disciples took this to heart and spread his message far and wide, also to Spain.
Once the Europeans set out to explore the whole world, they took the Christian faith with them. On Friday, October 12, 1492, the great explorer Christopher Columbus discovered the “New World.” On his second trip he brought the first Christian missionaries along. The cross accompanied the sword. Perhaps there is a reason why they are shaped in a similar way.
The conquistadors first conquered the Caribbean islands, Mexico, and the countries of Central America. Among the first missionaries were the Franciscan monks. Hernán Cortés, the leader of the conquistadors who conquered Mexico asked King Charles V, the ruler of Spain to send Franciscans to Mexico or, as he called it, New Spain. And came they did. The Franciscans became the largest order in the New World. St. Francis of Assisi, an Italian monk, founded them in 1210. They were, and are, a mendicant order, meaning they were beggars who relied on others to sustain them. They usually looked for menial work to pay enough for some food and a place to sleep, but if that did not work, they resorted to begging.
Like their founder, the Franciscans were skeptical of intellectual pursuits, preferring to place their trust primarily in faith and spreading it by preaching and praying. The Franciscans believed that Christ is coming again soon, so they set out to baptize as many people as possible to ensure that they will be admitted into the kingdom of God.
When the Franciscan friars arrived in the Americas the local population was dying in great numbers because they were exposed to European diseases for the first time. Since these holy men did not know about germs and contagion, they saw the demise of so many Indians as a sure sign that the end of the world was nigh.
The Franciscans held huge ceremonies where they baptized thousands of Indians, who probably did not understand much of what was happening to them, at one time. By 1533 the sixty or so Franciscans in Mexico had baptized more than one million two hundred thousand Indians. By 1536, another three million eight hundred thousand Indians were considered part of the church of Christ. Other holy men, members of other religious orders like the Dominicans, the Augustinians, and the Jesuits who came later, were worried about the fact that the Indians were not educated about the Christian faith before they were baptized by the Franciscans.
The Dominicans, or Order of Preachers, was founded in 1216 by Saint Dominic, a man who became the patron saint of astronomers and natural scientists. The Dominicans were also responsible for spreading the rosary among Catholics. Soon after they were founded, the pope charged them with ferreting out heresy throughout the Catholic world, so the Dominicans went on to play a central role in the Inquisition.
Because they were so concerned with orthodoxy, the Dominicans emphasized education through preaching and teaching. They were committed to educate the Indians before they converted them or perhaps they wanted to convert them through education.
The Augustinians, members of several religious orders who followed the Rule of Saint Augustine, written in about 400 AD by Augustine of Hippo, arguably the most influential Christian theologian, preacher, and writer outside those mentioned in the Bible, also came to the New World to do missionary work. They built several missions, taught, and preached, but like the other orders they soon realized that it did not help to preach in Spanish so they set out to learn the local languages, history, and culture, a good lesson for modern missionaries too. In many ways they were the first anthropologists in the Americas. They published dictionaries to help priests to interact with the Indians and African slaves that were soon brought in to work on the plantations.
The Jesuits, or Society of Jesus, founded in 1534 by a former soldier, Ignatius of Loyola, came relatively late to the Americas. They vowed direct obedience to the Pope and served as his shock troops in the counter-reformation as the Catholic Church vied for souls with their Protestant enemies in the wake of reformation brought on by the German Augustinian monk Martin Luther.
The first Jesuits arrived in Brazil in 1548. Since they came so late, they went to regions where the other orders were not dominant. That meant going into border regions and isolated, hard-to-reach places, well off the beaten track, most famously in Paraguay in the heart of South America. The Jesuits also established schools and seminaries where they educated the sons of important colonists. In addition to this, the Jesuits were astute businessmen who successfully ran several plantations.
Even though, beginning in 1516, every ship leaving for the “Indies” was expected to carry at least one priest, there were never enough religious workers in the New World. They never numbered more than a few thousand across all of Latin America, moving into a sea of Indians and Africans, learning their languages and customs to try and convert them. Despite their best efforts this was not always successful.
The Indians often mixed their ancestral beliefs with that of Christianity, pretending to be Christian, but secretly following a different faith. The Indians started to associate their gods with various Catholic saints, so when they seemed to pay homage to one of them, they were actually worshipping their ancient god. One good example of how they mixed Catholic culture with indigenous beliefs is the Day of the Dead, a week-long celebration that blends All Saints Day with ancient Indian beliefs.
It was one way to resist the colonizers.
The Christians were adamant and insisted that the Indians must convert to the true faith. They argued that Satan had been in control of pueblo country since the dawn of time and now it was high time for them, the emissaries of God, to root him out. Now it was God’s turn.
The missionaries smashed and burned all the Native American religious objects they could find, especially idols including kachina dolls. One missionary bragged about destroying a thousand of these dolls in a big bonfire.
They also burned Inca codices, which vexes archaeologists today, because they try to understand these societies and lament losing the opportunity to pore over these papers. A better approach might have been to save some of these artifacts for later study and to hold it as examples of idolatry.
Some Indians kept cutting out the hearts of sacrificial victims, often children before they threw them into sinkholes, supposedly entryways into the Underworld and the home of Chac the rain god, but now they just crucified them first.
Some priests went to brutal lengths to stamp out these atrocious rituals. Yet, despite their best efforts, the missionaries were unable to convert significant numbers of the Indian people to Catholicism even after ten years of trying.
Then a miracle happened:
On 12 December, 1531, a native peasant named Juan Diego had a vision of the Virgin Mary, in the form of young, pregnant Indian women, while he was on the way to Mass at a Franciscan mission near Mexico City.
She stands in front of the sun and it glows all around her. She speaks to Juan in Nahuatl, the Indian language, telling him she is the holy virgin mother of the true God. She says that she wants the people to build a temple for her in this very spot on Tepeyac Hill.
Juan goes to the bishop with the Virgin’s message, but the clergymen refuse to listen to him and send him away. Juan returns to the hill, and to his surprise, she comes to him again. Juan asks her to find a more important man to deliver the message, because the bishop will not listen to him, but she says she wants him, “the smallest of my children,” to bring this powerful message.
Juan goes back to the bishop, and this time he is granted an audience. However, and quite naturally, the bishop is skeptical and he asks for a sign that will prove that the Virgin sent him.
Juan returns to the hill and the woman appears once again to him. He tells her what the bishop said and she says that he must come back to next day when she will give him proof. However the next day, Juan’s uncle is ill and he is late for his meeting with the bishop, so he rushes past the place where he met the lady. She calls to him, and embarrassed, he stops.
She tells him that his uncle will recover and that he should go to the top of the hill. There he finds beautiful roses that should not be growing at that time of the year. The woman tells him to pick the roses and hide them inside his cloak because he must only show them to the bishop.
Juan does as she says and goes to the bishop. When Juan opens his cloak, a variety of beautiful roses in different colors, fall to the floor. The bishop is amazed. To drive home the point, the exact image of the Virgin is imprinted on Juan’s cloak. The bishop fell to his knees in prayer.
This appearance of the Virgin Mary was very important for the Indian people. She came to them as one of their own. Her skin was brown and she stood in front of the sun. The Sun God was the most important god in their pantheon. In this way she connected the symbols of the old religion to the new religion of Christianity.
Her dress was a pale red, the color of the blood sacrifices of the old religion and also the color of the blood of the people that were spilled by the conquerors. Red is also the color of the East and it represents new beginnings to the people of Mexico. Her mantle was blue, which shows she was of royal blood and possibly a goddess. Her mantle had stars in it which echoed a prophecy that predicted that a comet will signal the end of their civilization. She also wore a black maternity band with an Aztec cross in its center, indicating to them that she was offering her child to the New World. Others speculated that it was the Aztec goddess Tonantzin, disguised as the Virgin Mary, who appeared to Juan.
Either way, the people built a shrine for her on the site where she appeared and she became a new symbol of the Mexican people. Today the image hangs in the Basilica in Mexico City, which was built on the site where she appeared. Millions of people visit it every year.
The Indians no longer looked at Catholicism as something foreign, but as a faith growing out of their own religion. They saw the Virgin as their protector. With her dark hair, brown skin, and indigenous dress, she was one of them.
The name Guadalupe ties the apparition even more closely to the indigenous people. Some believe that Guadalupe is a Hispanization of the Nahuatl title used by the Virgin in her conversation with Juan Diego: she supposedly called herself Coatlaxopeuh “,the one who crushes the serpent,” perhaps the plumed serpent Quetzacoatl, which is pronounced “quatlasupe.” Another theory is that the archbishop named the apparition after a shrine to Our Lady of Guadalupe in Extremadura, the region from which many Spanish settlers came.
Whatever is the case, unlike the first ten years when the Spanish struggled to convert the Indians, over the next decade millions of Mexicans converted to Catholicism, a miracle by any measure.
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During the Mexican war of independence, she became a symbol for the freedom fighters. Father Miguel Hidalgo shouted “Long live the Virgin of Guadalupe!” when he launched the war in 1810.
A century later, during the Mexican Revolution, Emiliano Zapata and other fighters carried her image into battle. Over time the Lady of Guadalupe has become a powerful image of Mexican identity. In the end she helped free her people from the yoke of the Spanish colonizers, which makes me suspect that she was an Aztec goddess in disguise. If she called herself Coatlaxopeuh “,the one who crushes the serpent,” perhaps the plumed serpent Quetzacoatl, which is who the Aztec king Moctezuma thought the leader of the Spanish conquistadors, Hernan Cortes, was, it makes sense, since eventually she became the symbol that inspired her people to free themselves from the Spanish.
What do you think?
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Bibliography
Eakin, M. C. (2002). Conquest of the Americas. The Teaching Company.
Eakin, M. C. (2004). The Americas in the Revolutionary Era. The Teaching Company.
Goodwin, R. (2019). Ameríca: The Epic Story of Spanish North America, 1493–1898. Bloomsbury Publishing. New York.
González, J.L. & O.E. González (2008). Christianity in Latin America: A History. Cambridge University Press.
Lost Civilizations: Aztecs: Reign of Blood & Splendor. (1992) Time-Life Books. Alexandria.