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16.
Our Lady Does a Pictograph
JUST
THIRTEEN DAYS after the first bishop-elect of Mexico beheld the Castilian
roses tumbling from a tilma and the greater miracle it retained,
Our Lady of Guadalupe had her shrine. It stood on the hillside, an adobe
building, leaving the summit available to its worthier successor some
ninety years hence. This one went up in a hurry to satisfy the
unprecedented enthusiasm of the native. Her painting, by what it had to
say to them, fired the Aztecs with the determination to give the Holy
Mother her church by Christmas. They succeeded.
It turned out to be scarcely larger than an
ordinary chapel. But it was solidly built. It would serve the purpose
until the statelier edifice would rise in its pride of place, on the site
of the first apparitions. The builders received no pay and expected no
pay from their missionary supervisors. Having done the job on schedule,
they were content. They spent their Christmas of 1531 in a cheerful
anticipation of the next day when their handiwork would be solemnly
dedicated.
Don Fray Juan de Zumárraga anticipated the
dedication with equal zest. On Christmas Eve he wrote about it to his
countryman in Mexico, the conqueror Cortes, taking for granted that His
Honor's trumpeters would participate in the ceremony. It was to be a gala
occasion. The letter concludes: "How glorious it will be! The joy of it
all is indescribable. Tell my lady the Marquesa that eventually I want to
dedicate my cathedral to the Immaculate Conception because it was during
that feast that God and His Mother deigned to shower the land you won with
this great favor. No more now." The letter is signed, "The Bishop Elect,
filled with joy."
But did "this great favor" of December 12th
come on the feast of the Immaculate Conception? In a sense yes, it did.
For in Mexico, at the time, the liturgy extended the feast through an
octave and the faithful included all eight days in their observance. The
Middle Ages present a parallel. Their merrier nations kept Christmas
going strong for twelve days. Shakespeare recalls the custom in
Twelfth Night.
The dedication attracted the crowds
indiscriminately. Nothing before had ever brought so many Spaniards and
Indians together in a common cause. They marched in procession from the
cathedral in Mexico City to Tepeyac Hill, a distance of three and a half
miles. Hernando Cortes and his marquesa walked with them. They all went
singing or listening prayerfully, happy to be included in the ceremony, as
the image of the Holy Mother was carried in triumph to the shrine. There
a troop of Aztec dancers delayed its entrance, performing to the
accompaniment of a chant to Sancta Maria. The way was then cleared
for the bearers of the precious tilma, who with great caution took
it through the aisle to the sanctuary and hung it over the altar. Bishop
Zumárraga blessed the chapel, all the people in it, all the people
outside. He next did what was to be expected, so characteristic it is of
services in honor of Mary. He ended the solemnities with a sublime act of
worship, not of her, but of God. He offered Mass on the altar beneath her
portrait.
Juan Diego spent so much of his time in this
little chapel day after day that the bishop appointed him its custodian
and had a hut built for him adjacent to it. Here he lived out his
remaining years, taking care of the portrait, serving Mass beneath it, and
availing himself of the special permission to receive his Eucharistic Lord
three times a week, which was indeed a rare privilege then. The picture
of the Holy Mother made his memories a reality still. Its eyes, had they
not from her living face looked tenderly on him? Its silent lips, had
they not spoken of the great mysteries to him? Pilgrims walked away from
their visits to the shrine calling him the holy hermit.
They were half correct. Holiness he had. No
one ever saw him attending Mass, or heard him refer to the Holy Mother,
without being convinced of that. But he could not honestly be called a
hermit. Too many people were crowding into his life. Indians from far
and wide converged upon the shrine with but one purpose in mind: to study
the Dark Virgin. Their primitive language consisted in a symbolic
picture-writing. They read the painting accordingly. It had for them an
eloquence of meaning.
What meaning did the painting convey? What did
the picture say to the pagan Indians who flocked to it in 1531, the year
of its origin? It said to them what it still says to their descendants,
whether of pure Aztecan or of the mixed blood of the mestizo. The message
transcends all such divisions. But what did it teach?
The primary lesson it had for the Indian, and
proclaimed to him in a silence clearer than words, concerned his falsity
of worship. He had been adoring the sun as the supreme and almighty agent
of life: but here in the picture a woman of convincing charm stood
directly in front of it to conceal its splendor and to indicate thereby
her superiority. The hidden sun could not be so important as she, who
even had its outgoing rays around her in an aura of light as an evident
service to her beauty. The Indian could read in the design a tender,
forceful, illuminative rebuke. He must correct his error.
The Aztecs also worshipped Quetzalcoatl, their
fearful god of the air, a comet that used to appear at intervals to
disturb the earth and become associated with destruction. It had a long,
narrow and curved train, which suggested to the Indians a serpent of
fire. They accordingly named it the serpent god; indeed, the feathered
serpent god because it glided like a bird through space. Sometimes they
even called it the stone serpent since they had carved the shape of it
into many a statue to set up in their temples and on their pyramids. The
ruined monuments of this dreadful idol in Mexico certify the duration of
its worship through some two thousand years.
To appease the vengeful Quetzalcoatl the
heathen would sacrifice to it human lives, untold thousands of them every
year, however closely related and dear to him the victims might be. The
murderous rite did violence to his nature; yet he practiced it out of
dread; but here in the picture again, from its meaningful design, the
fascinated Indian caught a suggestion he had neither the will nor the
heart to resist. It came to him as a shock of relief to see at a glance
that the same gracious figure who blocks out the sun stands triumphantly
on a crescent, which to him represented the curved train or tail of that
ominous comet.
There can be no doubt from the more intimate
accounts of Mexico's primitive conversions, that the dominance of the
Dark Virgin over the symbolic crescent carried the strongest
inducement. She has it securely underfoot, it was a comfort to see,
showing no fear of the god it represented, inspiring confidence in her
authority over it. More than that, the crecent is burned out, black in
color; even Bishop Zumárraga had noticed that it lacked the glory of the
moon; it looked dead. The message from the painting emerged clearly: Why
should the Indian kill his humankind to satisfy a discredited god that is
none?
The message did not end there. The woman's
mantle, framing her open face and falling in loose folds to the length of
her inner robe, had something additional to say. The Aztec had
worshipped, as lesser deities, the whole firmament of stars: and now, as
he saw, studying the blue mantle, there were scattered over it a wealth of
golden stars, forty six in all. Meaning precisely what? They were but
ornaments to the beautiful Lady. The great stars of the firmament
subserve her. She is their mistress.
But she is not God. Her whole attitude
announces that. She is at prayer, her eyes humbly downcast, her hands
devoutly folded, her attention obviously directed to a Greater than she.
Not herself supreme, for all her eminence, she adores Another.
Whom? She has for her Aztec viewer the
obliging answer, small in size, yet not to be overlooked. She wears it on
a golden brooch at the neck of her robe. It is a black cross, sharply
formed on the gold of the trinket, having the exact shape of the official
black cross which the natives saw engraved or affixed to the banners of
the Spanish Expedition in their midst. The Indian caught the meaning:
this holy woman professes the faith of Hernando Cortes and his soldiers,
and the accompanying missionaries. Their God was hers. Should he not
also be the Indian's?
The Aztecs by the tens of thousands thought
so. They went in crowds, sometimes as many as 15,000 a day, to the
Franciscan missions to seek baptism in the faith of Our lady of
Guadalupe. There is nothing to compare with it, on record. A famous
painting speaks in silence to enormous groups of pagans who have come to
see it for themselves. What they see convinces. Within the space of a
few years the pictograph made millions of converts.
In regard to her miraculous pictograph that
converted Mexico to the Faith, experts in the Aztecan language are now
agreed that its heavenly artist had not asked for its identification, and
hers, to be Santa Maria de Guadalupe. They think that a misnomer.
Professor Byron MacAfee has pointed out that the Holy Mother wished
herself and the picture to be known by the former term, the Spanish ear
naturally understood the latter. After all, Bishop Zumárraga and the
missionaries had come to Mexico from a province in Spain where the
Franciscans had their famous Marian shrine of Guadalupe. It was an honest
error.
Nor does it lessen the honor which Mary
receives. But the correct title, which the Indians probably learnt from
Juan Diego when they came to study the painting, would have for them a
profound significance. It had Biblical overtones. It recalls the Mother
whom Genesis associates with her Child in the crushing of hell's
serpent. For the qualifier in that correct title, pronounced "tequatlasupe"
but spelt "coatlaxopeuh", happens to be a relative clause. The
identification in full would in English read: "Holy Mary, who will stamp
out the stone serpent."
That she banished the stone serpent-god from
Mexican worship may be seen in the ruins of the outdoor Temple of
Quetzalcoatl. The monstrous stone head of the serpent is still there,
jutting out from a mass of rock, but only as a reminder of a disinherited,
blood-thirsty tradition that had in one year claimed some 25,000 human
lives. The converts from such an atrocious bondage found the service of
Christ a release. They revered the Holy Mother for persuading them into
it.
To these converts, the angel in the picture had
remained a mystery until their instruction before baptism. They learned
about him from the missionaries. The padres in due course explained the
pure spirits of heaven, superior to man, yet beatifically subservient to
the Mother of Christ. What further clue did the Indian neophyte need?
The explanation now gave meaning to that figure with the wings, hovering
beneath the crescent and in an upward sweep of the hands lifting free of
the dreaded symbol the lower folds of his queen's majestic garments. And
all the while he is doing this he maintains his downward gaze—to the
earth, of course—in an appeal to the children of men to entrust their
cares to the Holy Mother above.
And now follows a strange question. Why do so
few of the many, who go to Mexico to see the painting, take notice of its
angel? His vermillion robe with a gold collar and the variously tinted
plumage of his wings, one should think, would compel attention. It does
not. Tourists, returned from the Villa de Guadalupe, full of animated
talk about the picture, seldom mention him. Presumably, he is as seldom
noticed. "But how did you like the angel?" usually gets for an answer, "What
angel?" Once the inquiry brought upon itself the bright rebuke, "Oh,
but there are three angels in all!" There are, indeed, the statues of
three angels atop the high back of the altar. However, while poised
directly above the sacred portrait in an act of service to it, they no
more belong to it than its elaborate frame or the golden crown from Pope
Leo XIII which hangs suspended immediately over the glass-covered
painting. They are outsiders. They have come from an earthly workshop.
The question remains: why should these be noticed and the heavenly product
not? The Queen of Angels painted one into her design not to be
overlooked.
The beseeching look on the angel's face would
have to be rated the high point in Our Lady's painting, were it not for
the look on her own. Words cannot describe it, so tenderly loving it is.
Nor can photographs do it justice. As Coley Taylor, an expert on art,
writes, "Reproductions do not convey the gentleness and softness of the
molding of the eyes and lips. In some the eyes seem to bulge and the lips
almost to pout, but there is none of that in the original—the contours are
all lovely." In truth, that downcast look of piety from eyes that seem
alive forces the comment: What she is doing is praying for us.
That look touches the Mexican heart. The
mestizo and the pure Indian or Spanish breed are equally affected. The
hymns they sing to the picture carry a lilt of ecstasy. Dale Francis,
having once listened to a native choir of nuns sing out their farewell to
the Holy Mother immediately before their departure from the
basilica, wrote of his absolute entrancement. The memory would remain a
joy forever. "I will never forget it," concludes his appraisal.
The beautiful face, which inspires connoisseurs
not so much Indian as Palestinian features. They consider it of the
Middle East. It shows a typical coat of tan. They are rather inclined to
believe that it is the same youthful face that the Infant Savior of the
world saw from the manger. They may be right.
When the apostles addressed the crowds on
Pentecost Sunday, the miracle of it was that they spoke in languages not
their own. The sensational effort brought results worthy of it. "There
were added that day" to the young Church, her chronicler writes, "about
three thousand souls" (Acts 2:41). Yet, with all due respect for the
achievement, the inspired linguists did use words.
Our Lady did not. She spoke to similar effect
without uttering a word. She required considerably more than a day to
come by her results. But come by them she did: a considerably larger
number of converts than three thousand.
The Mother of God, who to her great joy
witnessed the conversions of Pentecost Day, ranks second to none of his
saints and angels in working miracles. Hers outnumber the combined sum of
theirs. She, Our Lady of Victory, Our Lady of Lourdes, Our Lady of
Fatima, Our Lady of Guadalupe, did for the Indians what has been done for
no other people. She did what no one else has ever done. She performed
the only miracle of its kind. Without paint or brush she painted a
self-portrait and left it down in Mexico for keepsake. Without benefit of
speech, during an interval of less than a decade, from 1532 to 1538, she
talked eight millions of heathen natives out of their errors into the One,
True, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church.
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