New York Times writer Peter Steinfels reported on July 20,
2002, that a man who may never have existed will be declared a Saint by the
Pope within two weeks. The writer, himself a faithful Roman Catholic, noted
that Christianity (along with Judaism and Islam) purports to be a religion
based on historical events. Surely all events are interpreted, and within these
religious traditions there are admittedly truth-filled myths, legends,
embellishments, parables, and other literary forms. Yet, decades ago the
passion for history led to the removal of beloved Christopher from the list of
Saints, because it was discovered that there is no evidence for his existence.
Attachment to his alleged protective powers of travelers continues the
availability of St. Christopher medals and clergy willing to bless them for a
naïve following.
The Roman Catholic Church, along with "high church"
Anglicans, Eastern Orthodoxy, and a growing number of Protestants who
increasingly enjoy fantasy too often incorporate "Disney religion" within their
practices. People of all ages enjoy a good yarn; witness the appeal of Harry
Potter tales alongside soap operas with apparitions, angels in the flesh, etc.
- all ingredients of an uninformed peasant religion. And, many clergy buy into
it, because it increases their trade, however Oz like.
Since the late 2001 exposure of Enron's corruption, we are
ready to criticize big business for its misdeeds. Yet, it appears that, like
big business, church leadership is more than willing to look the other way
until a major scandal erupts publicly. (Witness pedophilia and other evils; see
the project on this website "Accountability of Rectors.")
The Roman Church has enough Saints on its official list -
some 10,000 or more. Some were mentally ill by today's standards, and some
provide exemplary, inspirational behavior. Adding another who may indeed be
solely a product of creative imagination is no less than fraud, regardless of
its pious effects on gullible people. Is the Vatican on the verge of creating
another office for creative writing designed to invent appealing, marketable
stories? How about a Saint Harry Potter and the Holy Grail?
Excerpts of the Steinfels report follows.
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.