``...This is partly about the difficult and hotly debated incorporation of various non-Christian histories and figures into the Virgin as canonical text, so there was a long and important excess that hung around her. Also some of the most circulated apocryphal texts extend and expand those references to give the Virgin her own godliness, and the Church was a long time agreeing to exclude them and didn't do so uniformly. There is some persistence in these kinds of apocryphal roles...'' Catherine
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It was raining and cold yesterday, so I blew off the entire day surfing the web on Guadalupe, the Virgin, Madonna, and so on. I have to say it was much more fascinating that wondering how the jihad of the al-Bushid will turn out.
In my earlier forays into Christianity, I spent most of my reading on the Old Testament and never really bothered much about Jesus, Mary, etc. So it was interesting to consider the difficulties that Mary presents.
So, just some notes.
It seems to me there is a tangible distinction between Guadalupe and Mary. Here's the story, first.
Guadalupe is the vision that an indian, Juan Diego had of the virgin. He was a Nahul peasant born (1474) in the Aztec empire in a village not to far from Tenochititlan just before the conquest. He was converted and baptized as Juan Diego by Franciscans as a middle aged man (1525), four years after Cortez conquered Tenochititlan and one year after the first Franciscans arrive in 1524. Juan Diego didn't have children and his wife died shortly thereafter. Since he lived several hours walk outside the capital, he walked to church bare foot, beginning early in the morning. On one of his walks he saw the virgin who calls him one of her sons (Juanito in Spanish) and speaks in Nahuatl (1531). After his vision he moved to the capital and lived in the church or the rooms attached to it. He was granted permission for communion three times a week. He died there in 1548 at age 74.
If you follow the cultural logic here, what's going on is the consecration of Mexico, not just its conversion. In particular it is the consecration de los Indios, by implication all the peoples of the new world.
Anyway there is a whole world of icons, rituals, festivals, and pilgrimages associated with this story. As a vision, Guadalupe, in contrast to Mary is already part of the holy trinity, at least within this context---by virtue of her appearance as an apparition. This sets up a kind of parallel universe where Guadalupe is to Mary, as risen Christ is to Jesus. So then Guadalupe becomes not just the mother of Jesus, but our mother nuestra Madre, in fact queen and mother of Mexico. (I had to pick my way through some of this in Spanish, which makes it suspect).
There is a lot of counter-reformation politics going on here, which I am not versed in. This period of new world conquest say from Charles I (1516-56) through Phillip IV (1621-65) that intersects Mary and Guadalupe, and is a reflection of the geopolitical battle between England and Spain, and ultimately between the US and Latin America.
No estoy yo aqui, que soy tu Madre? Are you not here, then who is your Mother? This was part of Juan Diego's vision, which means, obviously, if you exist, then I am your mother, and you are my son. Symbolically all the sons of Mexico are sons of Guadalupe. This sets up a resonant dialectic with Madonna and Child re-configured as Guadalupe and Juan Diego, the mother Church and the child of Mexico. There are many resonances going on simultaneously. Integration for one, but mixed with conquest-colonialization, erasure-merging of pre-Columbian cultures, defiance-humility, master-slave, mother-child, and the continued discrimination against indians by the mexican government and urban society in general--which might take us into the depths of the Zapatistas. This gets beyond me, so somebody else has to open that up.
While the visions were acknowledged as authentic by the second archbishop of Mexico in 1555, shortly after Juan Diego's death, it was essentially a provincial matter. In 1737, Holy Mary of Guadalupe is declared the patron of Mexico City, and 1746 Our Lady of Guadalupe is accepted for all New Spain, meaning from California into Central America and the Philippines, but formal declaration of the Virgin of Guadalupe as patron of the Americas had to wait until 1910. These dates crudely correspond to various historical points of struggle of European colonial powers. In the latest permutation, JP2 declared Juan Diego a saint in 1990. (Talk about stingy. How many Latin American cardinals, how many hispanic saints, when was the last hispanic pope?)
Some of the possible entanglements. Class. Guadalupe, Mary, Madonna and child all share a popular base (mass production icons) that creates a tension between the masses, peasantry, the poor and the aristocratic officialdom of the Church (frescos, paintings, sculpture). You might be able to set up a dialectic between the Virgin Mary as the official Mary, and Mary the mother as the popular Mary. Guadalupe escapes this by being an apparition, but she re-confronts the problem by her formal exclusion from the Trinity. If some nobody like the Holy Ghost gets in, how come his mother is kept out?
Another curious problem is the profound difference between US catholicism and Mexican catholicism. It has to be a reflection of the difference between the Irish and the Spanish, say between between Joyce and Paz. They seem practically incommensurable. When I look into these separate worlds, what am I looking at?
My mother was Irish Catholic (Kearns) and so was my step-father (O'Connell) when we lived in Mexico. On the other side, both my father and stepmother were Protestant and my sister is a Fundamentalist. What these details contribute are a kind of emotive world of relationships that give these apparently irrelevant historical, cultural and religious worlds far more presence in my mind, that they might otherwise have on there own.
Speaking of which, have you ever seen a Madonna nursing? It just occurred to me, that I haven't. It is implicit in some compositions, but I can think of one explicitly depicted.
Chuck Grimes