Particularly when the person who did so, was a Nahuatl-speaking Aztec who was seeing visions on the Hill of Tepeyac, formerly sacred to the goddess Tonantzin.
These were the guys who twice imprisoned St. Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the Jesuits, fer Chrissake (so to speak!)
Nope, Zumarraga was not going to be trumpeting that perplexing Indio business to the gents over at the Tribunal del Santo Oficio de la Inquisición.
But he did enjoy the most amazing increase of new converts since Pentecost AD 33. According to Fray Toribio de Benavente Motolinia, the number of baptized Indians in Mexico in 1536 was five million.
I will permit myself a little childish punctuation: !!!!!
Happy New Year, Boogieman.
“Spain was in the middle of the Inquisition, and there were lots of zealous (not to say paranoid) people running around, red-hot and ready to zot any morisco, converso, proto-Protestant or heretic who stuck his head up and made any sort of claims about special revelations.”
So, he didn’t say anything about this miracle, because the Catholic authorities would have denounced it? If that’s true, then why wouldn’t that be evidence, to a Catholic, that it was a false miracle? Aren’t you supposed to believe that the Catholic Church is divinely guided so as to judge miracles correctly? If it was a true miracle, there should have been no fear that they would denounce it, right?
It just seems all too convenient. After all, if we find a long-lost letter from the Bishop in some archive talking about the miracle, dated 1531, then that would no doubt be cited as evidence towards its legitimacy. However, you’re basically saying the absence of such documentation should also be cited as evidence towards its legitimacy, and I suppose, by extension, even if we found a letter from him disparaging the story, that same argument could be applied.
“But he did enjoy the most amazing increase of new converts since Pentecost AD 33. According to Fray Toribio de Benavente Motolinia, the number of baptized Indians in Mexico in 1536 was five million.”
Sure, that is amazing, but as someone else upthread stated that they were trying to convert earlier, and Cortes had to turn them away, it may have had nothing to do with the cult of Guadalupe. If I were an Aztec, and I just saw my seemingly invincible empire leveled by a couple boatloads of foreigners, I think I would be disillusioned with my gods and looking for a new religion too.
If the cult was responsible, then it could be just as reasonably seen as a syncretist marketing gimmick dreamed up to make Catholicism more palatable to the natives, or some syncretism that the natives dreamed up themselves, like we see with Santeria or Santa Muerte. All of those possibilities seem more likely to me than the miracle narrative, which asks me to believe that an ordinary looking painting is neither ordinary, nor a painting.
Oh well, I suppose we’ll just dance in circles on this one. I don’t care if anyone wants to believe in the whole miracle story, even if I think it’s hogwash. I just don’t think that we should accept that there’s enough evidence to put that legend in the history books as the certain cause of the conversion of Mexico. It’s good propaganda, but I doubt it’s good history.
Happy New Year to you too, Mrs. Don-o!