Stafford Poole, C.M. ” 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.” 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.”
None of these scholars deny the power of the Guadalupe story and devotion. Father Poole calls it “one of history’s outstanding examples of the fusion of religious devotion and national identity.” Over the centuries, Guadalupe has been equally seized by the creole Spaniards born in Mexico, by indigenous peoples, by royalists and by revolutionaries as a divine affirmation of their dignity.
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