GUADULUPE
HOLY OR HOAX?
The
apparitions of the Virgin Mary in Guadalupe in
The first
vision took place on the site of the pagan mother God in 1531. The bishop was informed that a beautiful
Lady had appeared saying she was the Virgin Mother of God. The bishop asked for a sign before he would
believe.
In other
apparitions, the Virgin gives no sign but the conviction and normalcy and
rapid spiritual progress of the witness so one wonders why that did not
suffice here. Please do not think that
spiritual progress is a great sign for anybody would pretend to be good when
the eyes of their fans are on them.
The Church will shout that we must not be so cynical and why not just
believe? I have two things to
say. Realistically people do often
pretend to be better than what they are.
All we are doing is acknowledging that fact. And as for the why not just believe advice
we can ask why just not believe? The
Church cannot complain if we don’t believe for it is our right not to. Yet it does complain. There is no way I can stand the Church
complaining – its just a sign of its intolerance. If you have an equal choice between
believing a strange claim and not believing in it, evidently if you are
rational you will not believe.
Jesus said
that asking for signs before being willing to believe was tempting God. God does signs when he wishes and not for
people who urge him to do a sign before they will believe. Here, the Virgin evidently disagrees with
Jesus and the Bible and God panders to the bishop’s wish for a sign. She gives him a miracle picture and roses
that bloomed out of season to boot.
She must be better than God.
Theologically, the visions must be ascribed to Satan which implies
that Satan wants Mary to be prayed to and believed to be mother of God and
ever-Virgin. They really refute
Christendom and Catholicism. The
perpetual Virginity and the Virgin birth are unbiblical legends. And the deity of Christ appears nowhere in
the New Testament. The whole story is
too similar to a Spanish legend that is much older. The place name, Guadalupe, even appears in
both stories (page 31, Looking for a Miracle).
The image
fits the tradition of forged self-portraits of the Virgin Mary and there is a
picture of the Merciful Virgin that was painted in Spain that is several
decades older than the Guadalupe image that looks too similar to it for the
latter to have been of divine origin (page 32, ibid). It is striking that the Virgin called
herself the Virgin and Mother of Mercy in her first appearance. The Catholic missionary magazine,
Science and
its instruments have shown that there is evidence that the Lady was sketched
before she was painted and the fingers have been shortened and the irises are
outlined. This tells against the idea
that the picture appeared as a result of an instant miracle by the Virgin
Mary. The images of the people in the
room are supposed to appear reflected in the right eye. But these images are so vague that they
could be anything. Such delusions show
what tone that books that defend the miracle take.
The evidence
is that this image was naturally painted.
The Virgin’s
mantle is off-centre on the head and it hugs the sides of the face and the
top floats above the top of the head.
These errors betray a human origin.
There is also the flaking that has taken place along the fold in the middle. A real miracle would not flake. The Lady stands on the moon which comes
from the Book of Revelation which symbolises the Church as a woman on the
moon. The Virgin is misidentified as
the woman of Revelation which indicates forgery. Her crown was painted out. She is too short and broad. Her arms would stretch out to below her
knees like a monkey if she laid them by her sides. There is an unnatural fold in the mantle
next her left thigh where it bends one way and then the opposite way for no
reason. And why does the angel hold
her by the robes and not by the moon on which she stands? The robe even bunches up a bit under her
where he holds her. But even then the
bunching takes a rectangular shape which is unnatural and can’t be explained
by her feet and the bunching should fit the shape of the crescent moon but it
does not.
The face of
the Lady is in shadow which is strange when she is so luminous that she gives
of a burst of light. The pro-Guadalupe
book, The Wonder of Guadalupe (page 51) states
that this is because no Lady likes being stared at! But it is only a picture and moreover the
Virgin appears to people to be stared at in an ecstatic state. The shadowing shows a bad choice of
colouring which refutes those who say the face is a miracle painting.
The
allegedly miraculous three-dimensional quality that mainly surrounds the
mouth which is due to roughness in the fabric (page 132, The Wonder
of Guadalupe) could just be coincidence. It does not appear on the whole face or
image which it would do if it were a true miracle.
The Lady
does not look very Jewish so she is not Mary’s self-portrait. Her face does not resemble the supposed
face of Jesus her son on the Turin Shroud so the two miracles are in
conflict. The two would have been
nearly identical if Jesus inherited all his genes from Mary and had no
father. The Turin Shroud is more
convincing than the image of Mary so it should be taken to refute it even if
it is a fake itself.
The
Wonder of Guadalupe,
admits on page 76 that the hands were shortened and the image was painted
over to hide cracks. The sunburst
surrounding the painting was repainted as were the tassels and the moon and
the stars on the mantle and the brooch and the border on the mantle. Still, the book unconvincingly boasts about
the ability of the image to survive damp and exposure to the smoke of burning
candles and frequent kissing and handling through the years. When the forged parts of the picture are so
durable why can’t the original parts naturally be the same – the argument for
miraculous preservation of the picture is unacceptable. There are horizontal lines showing fading
and cracks on the image. Two of them
can be seen on photographs even in The Wonder of Guadalupe which run
along between the hands and the sash round the waist.
Perhaps the
image has been replaced a few times like the Turin Shroud was. The replacement would be intended to defeat
the countless objections to authenticity by artists and researchers who
examined it so the image would be improved with every new forgery. The Church could not let the original image
alone so why could and would it not forge a new image when the old
deteriorates? It must have been
replaced if it was able to withstand so much carelessness. In 1753, the image was subjected to rapid
and frantic touching, kissing and rubbing five hundred times in two hours
(page 118, The Wonder of Guadalupe). Could it be that a duplicate passed of as
the original was used when the public were allowed to handle the cloth so
that the original would be safe?
It is
interesting that the roses which the Virgin made have rotted away. They were Castilian roses from
Diego
claimed that his uncle who was cured by the Virgin had cocolixtle which was a
fever that proved fatal to all who caught it.
But was it really? Juan knew
that it could not proved that it was the fever and still he paraded the cure
as a miracle. The fact that he went
for a priest for his uncle instead of appealing to the apparition for help
has disturbed many students of the vision (page 22, The Wonder of
Guadalupe). It is psychological
evidence that there never had been a vision.
Sceptical
priests testified in 1556 that an Indian or Aztec had painted the image. Fr de Maseques named the forger as Marcos
Cipac and it has been proved that there was such a painter. There was a severe persecution of
Christians in the area at the time the image appeared so it could have been
intended to bring in plenty of quick converts for persecutors soon give up
when the intended victims become too numerous. With the bizarre errors of the image their
verdict must be correct.
In December
1999, an abbot called Gullermo Shulenburg who was once associated with the
shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe despatched a five-page report to the
Read the following from www.philosophy-religion.org
Proof (or Not) of Saintly Existence
By PETER STEINFELS
On July 31, Pope John Paul II is scheduled to declare Juan Diego
Cuauhtlahtoatzin, a humble Aztec better known simply as Juan Diego, to be a
saint.
It is Juan Diego to whom the Virgin of Guadalupe is said to have appeared in
December 1531, and, when the local Spanish bishop demanded proof of the
apparition, it was on Juan Diego's rough cloak that the heavenly lady
miraculously imprinted her image, an image still displayed and revered in
its basilica in Mexico City and now reproduced almost everywhere.
One might expect that the Rev. Stafford Poole, an American priest and author
of "Our Lady of Guadalupe: The Origins and Sources of a Mexican National
Symbol" (University of Arizona Press, 1995), would be looking forward to
July 31. He is not.
He is one of a number of scholars who do not question Juan Diego's holiness.
They question whether he ever existed. Juan Diego, Father Poole says, is a
"pious fiction."
David A. Brading, a Cambridge professor, author of "Mexican Phoenix"
(Cambridge, 2001), a highly sympathetic study of the Guadalupe devotion, has
said, "There's no historical evidence whatsoever that such a person actually
existed."
……………..
The problem for historians like Father Poole or Professor Brading is that
though the Guadalupe portrait and devotions surrounding it clearly date to
the mid-1500's, it was not until 1648 that Miguel Sanchez, a creole priest,
published the elaborate account of apparitions, Juan Diego and his
miraculously transformed cloak. The same story, told more simply and
movingly in Nahuatl, the native tongue, appeared a year later in a book
produced by a friend of Sanchez.
Ever since then, Mexican churchmen have been trying fill this gap in the
record. If these 1648-49 accounts were based, as some claimed, on oral
traditions, why had not a single trace of them showed up in the huge mass of
religious material, both in Spanish and in native languages, that had
appeared in the intervening century? Missing documents, especially earlier
versions of the Nahuatl text, were hypothesized; various explanations were
offered for their absence. In 1666, depositions were taken from elderly
Indians and Spaniards. (The ages of four Indian witnesses were given as 100,
100, 110, and between 112 and 115.)
Many people argued that the image, which unlike the Shroud of Turin has
never been scientifically examined, could not have been created by human
hands - and therefore was itself proof of the 1648 account.
Still, the questions and the controversies have persisted. Writing in
Commonweal, a biweekly edited by Catholic laity, Father Poole stated, "More
than forty documents are said to attest to the reality of Juan Diego, yet
not one of them can withstand serious historical criticism."
Obviously the Vatican officials conducting investigations for the
Congregation for the Causes of Saints do not agree. But Father Poole
considers their procedures "one-sided, slanted and bordering on the
dishonest." No recognized scholars questioning the traditional accounts
about Juan Diego were consulted, he wrote; he found out that his own book
had been criticized but he was not given a chance to reply.
Other critics have been "demonized," he said in an interview, and accused of
racism or heresy. In a book he is completing he calls the canonization "a
sad and tawdry spectacle that does little service to the Church's mission
and credibility."
Professor Brading is on a somewhat different wavelength. In "Mexican
Phoenix," he praises Father Poole and declares that the American priest with
two other scholars has demonstrated that the 1649 Nahuatl account was based
on Sanchez's 1648 Spanish text - "a devastating criticism," Professor
Brading writes, of all theories about some earlier Indian-language source.
Still, Professor Brading is ambivalent about the battle over historicity. He
is enamored of the theological creativity of thinkers like Sanchez, who
conceived of Juan Diego "as another Moses and the image of Guadalupe as the
Mexican Ark of the Covenant," showing that God's own mother had founded
Christian Mexico.
The Guadalupe tradition has a theological truth, he says, that cannot be
discerned by "ill-judged questions about historicity," but only by thinking
of the image the way Eastern Orthodox Christians think of icons and thinking
of the story the way that Catholic theologians now regard many of the
miraculous Gospel stories about Jesus' birth.
So Professor Brading, in a letter to the London Tablet, a Catholic weekly,
ended up, on the one hand, calling the story of the Virgin and Juan Diego "a
sublime parable" and, on the other hand, concluding, "To canonize Juan Diego
makes as much sense, and as little, as to canonize the Good Samaritan."
That leaves some important questions. First, can what Father Poole calls "a
pious fiction" be transmuted by centuries of devotion into what Professor
Brading calls "a sublime parable"? Second, can the church really sidestep
the problem of historical fact? Christianity, after all, is notorious for
considering itself a history-based religion.
Conclusion
The vision
and miracle and of Guadalupe is nonsense.
BOOKS CONSULTED
Believing in
God, PJ McGrath,
Bernadette of
Looking for a
Miracle, Joe Nickell, Prometheus Books,
Miracles in
Dispute, Ernst and Marie-Luise Keller, SCM,
Miracles,
Ronald A Knox, Catholic Truth Society,
Spiritual
Healing, Martin Daulby and Caroline Mathison, Geddes & Grosset, New
St Catherine
Laboure of the Miraculous Medal, Fr Joseph I Dirvin C.M., Tan,
The
Incorruptibles, Joan Carroll Cruz, Tan,
The Sceptical
Occultist, Terry White, Century,
The
Supernatural A-Z, James Randi, Headline Books,
The Wonder of
Guadalupe, Francis Johnson, Augustine,
THE WEB Saints Preserve Us!
www.forteantimes.com/articles/159_saintspreserved.shtml
BIBLE QUOTATIONS FROM:
The Amplified
Bible
Saturday, Dec 18 2009