Days of commemoration, remembrance, glorification — and questioning.
This has been a full week. December 7, a moment in World War II, would change the world in ways never imagined. December 9, the feast day in the Catholic world of a Mejica peasant Indian who, it is said, encountered a dark complected “girl” — an apparition of the Virgin Mary that would change Nueva España — and its successor, the United States of Mexico — forever. December 12, 1531, the day on which that indio, given the name Juan Diego during his recent baptism, first spoke with the saintly apparition that would become known as La Virgen de Guadalupe.
These quite different historical moments have in common their transformative results — and their individual gatherings of doubters.
The attack on Pearl Harbor, December 7, 1941, so stunned U.S. society that few could at first believe it happened. It did not stun President Franklin D. Roosevelt exactly that way, nor some of his staff, nor Winston Churchill. It did stun FDR’s opponents and those American citizens of every political hue who simply didn’t want to get into another European war. Thus, the shock had double voltage — a surprise that came from the other side of the world.
Roosevelt, Churchill and many others sensed that the Japanese would eventually attack. Japan, with its militarily dominated government, was feeling squeezed by a surging increase in its population, and by the “Western powers’” widened search for oil supplies. Lacking natural resources, Japan was having to import oil, steel and scrap iron, among other raw materials critical to its growth. This led it to, first, aggressively “detach” Manchuria from China in 1931. In 1933, Japan walked out the League of Nations, which it believed was dominated by Western powers intent on curbing Tokyo’s expansionist plans. Then as revolution in China broke out, Japan found reason to invade that nation, rich in resources.
Simultaneously Adolf Hitler was on the march. Roosevelt, still dealing with the Depression, faced increasingly vocal resistance from U.S. neutralists, isolationists and pro-German sentiment, as he sought ways to aid Britain when Hitler’s army began overrunning western European countries.
Since Pearl Harbor, and still today, a number of people believe FDR knew the Japanese were going to attack the United States. But most of the U.S. public not only didn’t believe that, most were unsure where Japan was.Nonetheless, aviation hero Charles Lindbergh was popular for speaking against any effort to rebuild the Depression-devastated U.S. military.
The America First Committee and, of course, the German American Bund preached neutrality, if not sympathy for Hitler’s plans to create an efficient, disciplined Europe.
Roosevelt and his close advisors believed that if Japan did make a major attack in the Pacific region, it would be against such targets as the Philippines or Guam. Yet many in the military simply did not think Japan would ever commit such a “foolhardy” act. Certainly in Hawaii, neither Major General William Short, commander of Army ground and air forces, nor Admiral Husband Kimmel, area naval commander, believed in a Japanese attack, despite orders from Washington to take all precautions against such possibility. Both Short and Kimmel seem to have been disbelieving. After Pearl Harbor, the naysayers fell silent, some quickly left the United States.
Here, the (primarily, but not exclusively) Mexican debate regarding the existence of Juan Diego, and the December 12, 1531 event are joined. The authenticity of the Virgin of Guadalupe, and especially Juan Diego, continues, even among fervent Catholics. Mexico’s first bishop, a Basque Franciscan priest, Juan de Zumarraga, had just arrived in Nueva España, December 1528, then bearing the title of bishop-elect. By the time the simple peasant, Juan Diego, wearing a hard-used tilma (a thin maguey-fiber cloak, something like a sarape), showed up at his door with a Nahuatl message from the Virgin Mary, Zumarraga was still trying to get a handle on Nueva España and its native population. Juan Diego was turned away from the bishop-elect’s door by servants. That happened three times. Then, Juan Diego, complying with Zumarraga’s demand, brought a message from the Virgin. She had spoken to Juan Diego on his way to morning Mass, each time on the Tepayac Hill among the ruins of the Temple of the Mejica (Aztec) female goddess, Tonantzin — a temple Zumarraga had ordered destroyed. From among cactus, snakes and shattered stone, the Madonna plucked an armful of Castillan roses. Juan Diego placed them in his tilma and, at last, was ushered in to see the bishop. When he laid out the roses, his tilma was imprinted with the image of a dark-complected Amerindian girl. Zumarraga was to build a church on the site of Tonantzin, the Madonna had ordered.
Word of this “miracle” spread fast. Within 15 years, it was reported, nine million Amerindians were baptized. All tried to visit Tepeyac Hill, but, as one historian has written, the object of their worship was “equivocal,” for most continued to address the Virgin Mary as Tonantzin.
This apparition was questioned by churchmen of all ranks; long arguments ensued. Zumarraga himself was astonished. King Carlos V of Spain had given him the task of converting the entire indigenous population of New Spain, an impossible undertaking. He had prayed to the Virgin Mary and other saints for help. But this “heavenly” event was not what he expected, if he truly expected anything. However this occasion is construed, Church history provides us this astonishing, poignant Tepyac appearance and then ... nothing. Several “authenticating” texts by priests knowledgeable in Guadalupan lore appeared, plus theses by others. But under sharp scrutiny, they fail to convince,
Then, May 17, 2001, a Catholic priest, Eduardo Chavez Sanchez, now a Monsignor, was appointed by Cardinal Norberto Rivera Carrera, archbishop of Mexico, as Postulator of the Cause of the Canonization of Juan Diego. Pope John Paul II, it was said, was pressing for this enterprise. Chavez apparently painstakingly gathered a centuries-long paper trail — beginning 1531 — that he and the Catholic Church say is authentic. Chavez has produced a book — and now, of course, several videos — explaining and theoretically pinning down this trail, beginning with documented writing that Chavez says is that of Zumarraga.
Yet, there is a catechism written a year before Zumarraga’s death, in which he declared, “The Redeemer doesn’t want anymore miracles ... they are no longer necessary.” Zumårraga died June 3, 1548.