Book raises doubts on Guadalupe `saint'

Christian Century, July 17, 2002 by Paul Jeffrey

Despite the plans of the ailing Pope John Paul II to visit Mexico in late July, some church leaders have raised doubts about whether the man the pope will canonize there ever really existed. Their skepticism centers on the legend of the 16th-century Juan Diego, who is believed to have seen apparitions of the Virgin of Guadalupe and whose cloak was reported to have been imprinted with her image.

Manuel Olimon Nolasco, a Catholic priest and history professor at Vatican City's Pontifical University, claims in a new book that the image of the Virgin of Guadalupe on Juan Diego's cloak was hand-painted rather than divinely imprinted, as the Vatican maintains.

The visions of Juan Diego, an indigenous peasant--or nobleman, depending on which version of the story is presented--played an important role in the conversion of millions of indigenous Mexicans to the Catholicism of the conquering Spanish. In 1986 the Vatican approved Diego's beatification, a major step toward canonization, or sainthood.

Several prominent church historians have long doubted the story, but until recently the debate has been kept mostly private. Olimon Nolasco's book, La Busqueda de Juan Diego ("The Search for Juan Diego"), now makes public a series of previously unrevealed letters which he and other Diego skeptics have written to Vatican officials over the past 20 years.

One letter, from Carlos Warnholtz, a former priest at the Basilica of Guadalupe, recounts the experience of moving Diego's cloak from the old basilica to a new one two decades ago. "I had the luck, good or bad, to directly and closely contemplate the original image on the night of 4 November 1982, and since then I have stopped believing that it was miraculously imprinted on the cloak of Juan Diego," Warnholtz states in a letter that he sent the Vatican in January. "But I have been careful, and I'll continue being careful, not to share this in front of people who could suffer some sort of spiritual ruin."

Olimon Nolasco's book recounts how basilica officials ordered an examination of the cloth by scientists in 1982. The investigation concluded that the image had been hand-painted. The abbot of the basilica, Guillermo Schulenburg, quietly turned the conclusions over to the Vatican. Schulenburg and others have come to doubt the authenticity of Juan Diego.

When the Vatican began its investigation of the case for Diego's canonization, a group of priests complained that Rome was ignoring any evidence that wasn't favorable. "The people assigned this work were totally partial about the historicity of Juan Diego," the priests wrote Vatican officials. The priests complained that the official investigators never consulted historians with a point of view different from their own, listening instead only to "very devout persons ... [who] managed arguments with little intellectual honesty, and with an exaggerated and flimsy piety." In another letter, the priests contended that the Vatican's failure to adequately investigate Diego's existence "puts in doubt the credibility and prestige of our church, to which we belong and which we love as Catholics."

The publisher of Olimon Nolasco's book, Plaza y Janes, is simultaneously coming out with a book by a supporter of Diego. In Juan Diego, el Aguila que Habla ("Juan Diego, the Eagle Who Speaks"), Norberto Rivera, the Catholic archbishop of Mexico City, claims he bears no ill will toward those who doubt Diego's existence. "I understand and pity all of my brothers who don't share this security [of believing in Diego]; it pains me that they cannot enjoy something so beautiful, so marvelous," Rivera says in the book.

Yet in the Olimon Nolasco book, a group of Mexican clergy complain in a letter to Cardinal Angelo Sodano, the Vatican secretary of state, that the archbishop has portrayed doubters in a negative light. Other clergy skeptical of the Juan Diego story have remained silent because, they maintain, "they're afraid of reprisals."