7 Our Lady of Guadelupe

OUR LADY OF GUADALUPE.

The story and celebration of Our Lady of Guadalupe are not so familiar to Catholics, or so well appreciated by others, as to render useless or uninteresting, especially in this month of Mary, an account of her veneration in Mexico. What this actually, veritably is, no writer, so far as we are aware, has yet undertaken to show—at least, from such literary evidences of popular conviction as best illustrate the subject. How anything supernatural could shine or blossom in a land of wars, robbers, Indians, is an old doubt, notwithstanding that revelations have taken place in countries which needed them less than did the once idolatrous Aztecs. Let us now endeavor to make clear what the true nature of the miracle of Guadalupe is; to exhibit its real veneration by means of testimonies borrowed from the worthiest Mexicans; and to prove that the faith of Guadalupe is not shallow, but long and well-established, widespread, and sincere.

Here follows a brief history of the renowned miracle of Tepeyac. In 1531, ten years after the conquest, the pious and simple Indian, Juan Diego, was on his way to the village of Guadalupe, near the city of Mexico, there to receive the instructions of some reverend fathers. Suddenly, at the hill of Tepeyac appeared to him the Blessed Virgin, who commanded her amazed client to go forthwith to the bishop, and make known that she wished a church to be built in her honor upon that spot. Next day the Blessed Virgin returned to hear the regret of Juan Diego that he could not obtain the ear of the bishop. “Go back,” said the Holy Lady, “and announce that I, Mary, Mother of God, send thee.” The Indian again sought his bishop, who this time required that he should bring some token of the presence and command of his patroness. On the 12th of December, Juan Diego again saw Our Lady, who ordered him to climb to the top of the barren rock of Tepeyac and there gather roses for her. To his great astonishment,[190] he found the roses flourishing on the rock, and brought them to his patroness, who threw them into his tilma or apron, and said: “Go back to the bishop and show him these credentials.” Again came the Indian before the bishop, and, opening his tilma to show the roses, lo! there appeared impressed upon it a marvellous image of the Blessed Virgin. The bishop was awestruck and overcome. The miraculous occurrence was made known and proved. Processions and Masses celebrated it, and its fame spread far and wide. A large new cathedral was erected on the hill of Guadalupe, and multitudes from all parts flocked thither. Specially noteworthy is the fact that the new shrine to Our Lady was erected in the place where once the Indians worshipped their goddess Totantzin, mother of other deities, and protectress of fruits and fields. The marvellous picture was found impressed upon the rudest cloth, that of a poor Indian’s apron, the last upon which to attempt a painter’s artifice—and hence the greater wonder, the artistic testimony regarding which is something formidable and wonderful in itself.

What is known in Mexico as the Day of Guadalupe is extraordinary as a popular manifestation. On the 12th of December every year, fifteen or twenty thousand Indians congregate in the village of that name to celebrate the anniversary of the Marvellous Apparition. The whole way to the famous suburb is crowded with cabs, riders, and pedestrians of the poorest sort, a great number of them bare-footed. All day there is an ever-moving multitude to and from the village, and, indeed, the majority of the inhabitants of the city of Mexico seem to be included in the parties, families, and caravans of strangely contrasted people that wend their way to the shrines on the hill. The most numerous class of pilgrims are the saddest and the most wretched—we mean the ill-clad, ill-featured, simple, devoted Indians. On them the luxuries of the rich, the passions of the fighters, the intrigues of politicians, have borne with ruinous effect. Drudging men and women; hewers of wood and drawers of water; bare-breasted peasants, with faces dusky and dusty, the same who any day may be seen on Mexican roads carrying burdens of all sorts strapped to their backs; children in plenty, bare, unkempt, untidy, and sometimes swaddled about their mothers’ shoulders; numerous babes at the breast, half-nude—these are some of the features in a not overdrawn picture of the primitive poverty which assembles at Guadalupe, and, in fact, in every Mexican multitude whatsoever. Perhaps nowhere outside of Mexico and the race of Indians can such a problem of multitudinous poverty be seen. Its victims are those over whom the desert-storms of wars and feuds innumerable have passed, and, spite of all their wanderings as a race, they yet wear the guise and character of tribes who are still trying to find their way out of a wilderness or a barren waste. Let enthusiasts for self-willed liberty say what they will, wars of fifty years are anything but conservative of happiness, cleanliness, good morals, and that true liberty which should always accompany them. However fondly we cherish our ideals of freedom, we must yet bear in mind the wholesome, wholesale truth of history, that no actual liberty is reached by the dagger and guillotine, or by massacre, or is founded on bad blood or bad faith. Those who lately celebrated the execution of Louis XVI. and the intellectual system of murder established by Robespierre, and not totally disapproved[191] by Mr. Carlyle, have good reason to be cautious as to how they offend this menacing truth.

A cathedral and four chapels are the principal structures of the picturesque hillside village of Guadalupe. By a winding ascent among steep, herbless rocks, tufted here and there with the thorny green slabs of the cactus, is reached at some distance from the cathedral the highest of the chapels, which contains the original imprint of the figure of Our Lady. Looking up to the chapel from the crowd at the cathedral may be seen a striking picture, not unlike what Northern travellers have been taught to fancy of the middle ages, but the elements of which are still abundant in the civilization of Europe. It is simply the curious crowd of pilgrims going up and down the hill, to and from the quaint old chapel, built perhaps centuries ago. The scene from the height itself is charming and impressive. The widespread valley of Mexico—including lakes, woods, villages, and a rich and substantial city, with towers and domes that take enchantment from distance—is all before the eye in one serene view of landscape. In the village there is a multitude like another Israel, sitting in the dust or standing near the pulquerias, or moving about near the church door. As Guadalupe is for the most part composed of adobe houses, and as its mass of humble visitors have little finery to distinguish their brown personages from the dust out of which man was originally created, the complexion of the general scene which they constitute can only be described as earth-like and earth-worn. Elsewhere than in a superficial glance at the poverty of Guadalupe we must seek for the meaning of its spectacle. Is this swarming, dull-colored scene but an animated fiction? No—it is the natural seeking the supernatural. And the supernatural—what is it? It is redemption and immortality, our Lord and Our Lady, the angels and saints.

The cathedral is a building of picturesque angles, but, except that it is spacious, as so many of the Mexican churches are, makes no particular boast of architecture. A copy of the marvellous tilma, over the altar, poetically represents Our Lady in a blue cloak covered with stars, and a robe said to be of crimson and gold, her hands clasped, and her foot on a crescent supported by a cherub. This is the substance of a description of it given by a traveller who had better opportunities for seeing it closely than had the present writer during the fiesta of Guadalupe in 1867. Whether the original picture is rude or not, from being impressed upon a blanket, he has not personal knowledge, though aware that it has been described as rude. Nevertheless, its idea and design are beautiful and tender. Everywhere in Mexico it is the favorite and, indeed, the most lovely presentment of Our Lady. Like a compassionate angel of the twilight, it looks out of many a shrine, and, among all the images for which the Mexican Church is noted, none is perhaps more essentially ideal, and, in that point of view, real. Where it appears wrought in a sculpture of 1686, by Francisco Alberto, on the side of San Agustin’s at the capital, it is, though quaint, very admirable for its purity and gentleness. Time respects it, and the birds have built their nests near it. The various chapels in and about the city dedicated to Our Lady of Guadalupe are recognized by the star-mantled figure. The Baths of the Peñon, the cathedral at the Plaza, the suburb of Tacubaya, have each their pictorial witnesses of the faith of Guadalupe; and to say that its manifestation[192] abounds in Mexico is but to state a fact of commonplace. Rich and poor venerate the tradition of the Marvellous Appearance, now for three centuries celebrated, and always, it seems, by multitudes.

What else is to be seen at Guadalupe besides its crowd and its altar is not worthy of extended remark. The organs of the cathedral are high and admirably carved; over the altar’s porphyry columns are cherubim and seraphim, all too dazzling with paint and gold. Here, as in other places of Spanish worship, the figures of the crucifixion have been designed with a painful realism. Outside of the church a party of Indians, displaying gay feathers, danced in honor of the feast, as their sires must have done hundreds of years ago. Inside it was densely crowded with visitors or pilgrims, and far too uncomfortable at times to make possible the most accurate observation of its ornaments. But it may be well to repeat that the church is divided into three naves by eight columns, and is about two hundred feet long, one hundred and twenty feet broad, and one hundred high. The total cost of the building, and, we presume, its altars, is reckoned as high as $800,000, most of it, if not all, contributed by alms. The altar at which is placed the image of Our Lady is said to have cost $381,000, its tabernacle containing 3,257 marks of silver, and the gold frame of the sacred picture 4,050 castellanos. The church’s ornaments are calculated to be worth more than $123,000. Two of its candlesticks alone weighed 2,213 castellanos in gold, and one lamp 750 marks of silver. To Cristobal de Aguirre, who, in 1660, built a hermitage on the summit of Tepeyac, we owe the foundation of the chapel there. It was not, however, until 1747 that Our Lady of Guadalupe was formally declared the patroness of the whole of Mexico.

Of the many celebrations of Mexico, none are altogether as significant as that of Guadalupe. It has become national, and, in a certain sense, religiously patriotic. Maximilian and Carlota, the writer was informed, washed the feet of the poor near the altar of Our Lady, according to a well-known religious custom. The best men and women of Mexico have venerated the Marvellous Appearance—which, however amusing it may be to those who are scarcely as radical in their belief in nature as conservative in their views of the supernatural, is but a circumstance to the older traditions which have entered into the mind of poetry and filled the heart of worship. What of the wonderful happenings to the great fathers of the church and the mediæval saints, all worshippers of unquestionable sublimation? Say what you please, doubt as you may, saints, angels, miracles, abide, and form the very testament of belief. There is not a Catholic in the world who does not believe in miracle, whose faith is not to unbelievers a standing miracle of belief in a miracle the most prodigious, the most portentous; and yet to him it has only become natural to believe in the supernatural. The Mexicans venerate what three centuries and uncounted millions have affirmed, whence it appears that their veneration is not a conceit or humbug, but at root a faith.