Is Juan Diego a saint?
Can an incident that did not take place in 1531 effect you or me today? Bear with me here because this odd personal story is a convergence of real experience, legend and sanctity, none of which is provable. Scientists need not apply, yet the skeptic and Christian in me is who wants to explore this entire matter. On July 31, 2002 Pope John Paul II canonized the Mexican Indian, Juan Diego, in a ceremony at the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico City. Saint Juan Diego, who lived from 1474 to 1548, became the first indigenous resident of the Americas to attain sainthood.
Most Catholics, especially of Mexican and Hispanic American heritage, are aware of his story, but I will summarize:
Juan Diego’s legend states that on 1531 on the hill of Tepeyac near Mexico City an apparition of the Virgin Mary spoke to him in his native tongue. She wanted the bishop to build a shrine or church dedicated to her at that site. Juan Diego approached the bishop who eventually, after two visits, was intrigued but requested proof. Back on Tepeyac the Virgin Mother directed Juan to gather some rare flowers (roses in some versions) that grew impossibly out of place and season as a miraculous sign for the bishop. Juan dutifully folded them in his tilma, a kind of rough weave cloak, and brought them to the bishop. When he unfurled his cloak the bishop not only was surprised to see the flowers, but he was more surprised to see a radiant painting or image of the Virgin on the tilma. Juan was apparently unaware that the image was there until after the bishop saw it. The bishop took it and arranged to build a church.
Today that image on the tilma (ermita) is on display under protective glass at the basilica mentioned above. In 1981 I viewed it from behind the basilica altar while standing on a moving walkway for tourists hidden from the worshipers and services. The notoriety of the Guadalupe Virgin painting rivals that of the Mona Lisa in pedestrian circles, but no image of the Virgin Mary has had more impact on Catholicism. I lived in New Mexico for 17 years through 1992. Images of Our Lady of Guadalupe, or the “Guadalupano” as they call it there, abound as holy medals, statues, postcards, posters, carved signs, tattoos, and artistic reinterpretations.
When I settled in New Mexico in 1975, I was a young artist fresh out of art school. Santa Fe became my home because I enjoyed the vibrant art community, brilliant landscapes and desert mountain climate. The Santa Fe and Taos areas were also the homes to thousands of urban dropouts, spiritual seekers and an odd array of older bohemians who settled there decades earlier. One of these characters who once came to call me his “best friend” was Bill Tate, the World War 2 veteran, incomparable storyteller, and small time art gallery owner/operator.
In 1974 Tate moved his gallery from Truchas, a small village higher up the Sangre de Cristo range made famous by the movie The Milagro Beanfield War. In Truchas (trout) he was a long time Justice of the Peace, but increasing violence and drug related crime drove him to move. He also wanted to be closer to his ex-wife and his only child, Andrea, who was just 7 at the time. To the average tourist who visited Tate in his Canyon Road “Tate Gallery,” he was that eccentric, partially crippled old artist with long white hair and beard in a cluttered gallery filled with folk art and a ragtag collection of work by dead and living artists (including mine). His pun on the famous Tate Gallery of London was intended. For many years he was listed in the Who’s Who in America directory. Tate drank instant coffee constantly from a white Corning Ware cup because that material was a by-product of space age technology. He loved science. He rolled his own Prince Albert tobacco cigarettes because he smoked a lot and needed to conserve money. He lived mainly off his Navy veteran’s disability pension, and he slept in a back room of the gallery.
At a glance Tate looked like a liberal old hippie, but he was a staunch conservative and a dyed-n-the-wool Reagan Republican. He looked twenty years older than he was. When Tate was 18, he lost 90% of the use of his right arm after suffering a fractured spine in a naval accident on the Pacific front. When I knew him he was diabetic, non-insulin dependent. His feet tinged with a purple color up to his calves always hurt. He shuffled along in worn slippers, hunched over from a curved upper back. A bolo tie with a huge turquoise stone framed in silver always dangled from his neck. He rarely walked anywhere outside, but he did enjoy his dark green,1973 Mark IV Lincoln, his second Continental, that he bought used from a friend.
Over the twelve years I knew I him I noted that people either regarded him as a kind, old sage, or merely turned away from his gallery after seeing the clutter and smelling the smoke without so much as a second glance in his direction. Tate the sage appeared if anyone took the time to converse with him. He could spin yarns about himself, politics and history for hours, yarns that I heard him embellish over the years. His self-published poetry and small watercolor landscapes sold well at modest prices, but his ungainly, symbol oriented acrylics and oils rarely sold. He executed a version of the 14 Stations of the Cross loosely based on the Penitente sect lore. His “masterpiece” was a 96 by 48 inches panel painted in acrylic of the Virgin Mary. It was never for sale. He reinterpreted the Guadalupano as “Our Lady of Truchas” and encased the lady in an areola that resembled an upright trout shape. His crude rendering of her lovingly imitated the original. He sold many postcards that featured this painting. Tate was not a Catholic but living among the Penitente subculture in the Truchas area deeply affected his spiritual sensibilities. He was amazed by science, yet he was ready to embrace the miraculous.
Here I’m going to cut to the chase because it would take many chapters to describe what happened between the lines. When I met Tate in 1975, I borrowed a book he had about Theosophy and the occult. My art interests drew me to this area of metaphysics because many of the modern art pioneers had themselves found inspiration there for their work. Fascinating stuff, so much so that I pursued the teachings of many groups and cults that presented versions of Theosophy--the mystical, direct knowledge of the divine. By 1979 I was deeply attracted to a large New Age cult based in California. I never fully joined but my obsession helped my first marriage to fail. In 1980 I began the arduous task of years of critically sorting it out. By default I became an internationally known professional consultant on cults. I made most of my living from cult research, media consultations and related “deprogramming” interventions from 1986 to 1998. Tate followed my career throughout—I was a frequent visitor at his gallery and often did repairs and helped him straighten up the place.
Meanwhile, Tate was languishing more and more as the 1980s went by. He nearly died twice but hospital emergency treatment kept him going. By 1986 he was on oxygen continuously. No, he did not quit smoking his rolled cigarettes. One day, Christmas Eve day, I visited him in the morning for an hour just before I was to leave for Florida to help a family who wanted to exit counsel their daughter, 25, out of the same cult I rejected many years before. Tate looked haggard and pale. After some small talk, uncharacteristically he asked me what I thought happened after we died. Despite all my readings from the world religions I recall that I blurted out something inane: “I imagine we will have another adventure.” He peered up at me, hunched over his desk with the oxygen tube stuck in his nostrils, and smiled. He had a twinkle in his eye.
My wife, Becky, called me the following morning, Christmas Day, while I was waiting to meet the family’s daughter in Florida. The parents were tense because the young lady had no idea I was in the house—the intervention was to be a surprise and she was free to leave at any time. In a few hours this family was depending on me to convince her to stay and talk it through for several days. They knew that if the cult got wind of my presence they would demand she leave right away. In fact, she did call them the second day to tell them she was delaying her return and that I was there. The cult managers sent out police who were told I was holding someone against her will. That strategy backfired as it angered the young lady that the cult would lie, so she listened to me and broke away completely by the third day. Becky called to tell me that Andrea, Bill Tate’s now twenty-year-old daughter, had called to tell me that Bill died sometime after midnight. I cried but I had no time to grieve.
This was Christmas day, the day twenty years earlier when Bill was rushing down the slippery mountain road from Truchas to get his pregnant wife to the medical center. She was about to deliver her seventh child—Janice had six from a previous marriage. They did not make it. Bill had to help deliver his daughter in a snow bank on a blanket next to a natural monument called Camel Rock off Highway 84. Janice was a veteran mom, so it was not a difficult birth and Andrea, Bill’s most precious Christmas gift, did well on the way to the hospital. By the time I returned home on January 1, it was New Year 1988 and Tate’s memorial service had already taken place. It was a colorful affair in a room crowded with an assortment of artists, dignitaries and some vagrants who often tapped Bill for spare change. My wife attended. Tate was cremated and by his request his daughter spread his ashes at night out on Canyon Road.
Andrea was in her restaurant, “Andrea’s,” that she and her Mexican husband had just opened, when I arrived to meet with her on New Year’s Day. Tate’s “Our Lady of Truchas” painting was propped up next to where we stood. Janice was sitting nearby. It was Janice who found Bill dead in his bed. Though they were divorced, she often looked in on him. Andrea told me that Tate’s landlord demanded she get all his stuff out of his gallery-home before the end of the year. Andrea and her husband threw out unwanted items, but moved all the art, antique objects and his bed. While she was talking to me I sensed a distinct, pungent fragrance of roses come and go. When I mentioned this to Andrea she laughed. She said this same scent had accompanied some of Tate’s objects when they moved them, like his bed and the large painting. She said she and her husband noted the strong scent of roses when they spread Tate’s ashes on the road. The ashes got caught in a whirlwind or “dust devil” that swirled around Andrea before blowing away into the night. In the restaurant when I sniffed closer to the painting I could smell nothing. Janice said she smelled nothing throughout our conversations, but whenever I checked with Andrea, she and I sensed the rose aroma come and go at the same time. Then it faded after a half-hour, never to return to me.
What to make of this? Was Tate a potential saint? Not by a long shot if you want to compare him to the likes of Saint Francis or Saint Therese of Lisieux. However, in our minds, Andrea, her husband and I did experience something of the sacred in this. I felt it was a gift or holy sign that Tate’s spirit lived on and that “he” was okay. I will not go into the extensive literature on this phenomenon, that of a lingering or accompanying fragrance, known to nearly all religious traditions regarding their saints, alive or dead. It is either an inexplicable olfactory hallucination or an extra-sensory event that effects the senses. Or it is both. It could also be a hoax. I know from hypnosis studies that smells can easily be induced or changed in receptive persons through suggestion and self-suggestion. Stigmata fall under the same category. Over the centuries the Church has been more or less aware of self-deception and the deceptive nature of apparently miraculous phenomena and apparitions. Back in the 15th Century the Church created the office of “the promoter of the faith” also known as “the devil’s advocate” to test such claims supported by the “postulator.”
The vast majority of miracles and paranormal claims do not pass skeptical tests. The ones that do are hardly proved scientifically, but some remain as accepted or acceptable signs.
Do “odors of sanctity” necessarily indicate sanctity? It was reported that a divine scent accompanied St. Polycarp of Smyrna, who was martyred in 155. At the moment of the death of George Gurdjieff in 1949, those present said that the room filled with the scent of violets. Gurdjieff was one of more controversial cult leaders of the 20th Century whose outrageous shenanigans as a spiritual director left many lives in shambles despite the many who remained utterly devoted to his legacy. The odor of sanctity appears to the devoted, so it appears, no matter the saintly status or tradition.
This brings me back to St. Juan Diego. Tate believed in the tradition of the miracle icon of Guadalupe. He devoted tens of hours of painful work to execute his large masterpiece in honor of that image. Tate had to hold his right hand up with his left hand to paint, and he had to balance on a stool precariously to paint the upper composition of Our Lady of Truchas. He liked the idea of an ordinary Indian sparking one of the holiest events of the Western Hemisphere. Apparently, so had the Church. In the August 15, 2002 issue of The AD Times (Vol. 14, No. 17) in an article titled “Diocese celebrates St. Juan Diego,”the writer, Tara Connolly, mentioned that the “controversy surrounding the life of St. Juan Diego dates back to 1531.” She does not describe that controversy, but one priest, Stafford Poole, C.M., challenges the legend of this Marian icon and Juan Diego in his extensively researched book, Our Lady of Guadalupe: The origins and sources of a Mexican national symbol, 1531-1797 (The University of Arizona Press, Tuscon, 1996).
Poole found that the apparition account was unknown in Mexico prior to 1648 when it was published by a Mexican priest. At that time the Virgin became the predominant devotion among the criollos, the Mexican born Spaniards who felt disenfranchised by the ruling nation. The origin of the “ermita,” or painted cloak that bears the image of a dark skinned Virgin Mother, according to Poole, is not miraculous. The original image, to which parts were added later, was painted by one of several, extremely talented Indians, perhaps one named Marcos de Aquino of the 16th century. Joe Nickell, a well-known investigator of paranormal claims, writes in the September/October issue of the Skeptical Inquirer that the results of a secret 1982 scientific study confirmed that the Guadalupano was painted. “Art restoration expert Jose Sol Rosales examined the cloth with a stereomicroscope and determined it did not originate supernaturally but was instead the work of an artist who used the materials and methods of the sixteenth century." Only later in 1634 was it first and only vaguely described as miraculous in origin.
Almost nothing is known or recorded of devotion to the image on the ermita by native Indians through the 17th century. Essentially, Poole--he is not alone among scholars---argues that the Guadalupe miracle account was formulated over one hundred years after the alleged event. Former Abbot Guillermo Schulenberg, who ran the Guadalupe basilica for 33 years, protested the beatification of Juan Diego in a letter to the Vatican in 1996 saying that the legend was a fabrication. The elderly Abbot had to resign his post in the ensuing scandal (Elizabeth Fullerton for Reuters:“Virgin of Guadalupe draws many to Mexico,” The Philadelphia Inquirer, 12/13/1999). One priest among the skeptics, Reverend Manuel Olimon, a professor of religion at the Pontifical University of Mexico, expressed concern: “The danger, says Father Olimon, is that the Vatican will have to de-canonize Diego as it did with St. George, the legendary dragon slayer who did not stand the test of time” (Jay Root for Knight Ridder: “Doubts are raised over would-be saint,” The Philadelphia Inquirer, 3/17/2002).
As a Catholic I am not required to specifically include any saint in my private devotional life, just as I am not required to pray with a rosary. I understand that the Church maintains to the best of its ability, and sometimes for political reasons, non-canonical traditions to enhance the spiritual life of the Body of Christ. I am a Catholic because I can both follow the essential Christian Gospel as defined by the Church and choose among an array of Church-guided traditions that accommodate the wide range of cultures and personalities that participate in the Body of Christ. I feel freer as a Catholic than I believe I would in any other tradition that represents the Gospel I accept and believe. I revere the Guadalupaño not because it is a provable miracle (today I believe that the image was painted by a talented Indian as the evidence shows) but because it has emerged as a sacred icon that continues to inspire and sanctify believers like my old friend Bill Tate. It appears to me that when we seek out the holy and love one another, our lives can be graced by the “scent of sanctity” whether we smell it or not. The fact that I experienced this gift of God (or grace) of the mystical fragrance of roses through my friend and his painting is a treasure for me whether or not any one else believes it. Perhaps Juan Diego’s apparition experience began like that too, as a simple gift from God.
jszimhart@dejazzd.com
September 5, 2002