THE VIRGIN OF GUADALUPE IN MEXICO.

 

Our Lady and Juan Diego

Note. Some pamphlets on the apparitions of the Blessed Virgin Mary have come providentially to the editorial office, apparitions authorized by the usual church, such as: Our Lady of Guadalupe, Our Lady of Mount Carmel, Our Lady of Lourdes and Our Lady of Perpetual Help, which I will put at your disposal in this blog, I only ask for a little patience because they must be scanned, transferred to Word, adapt the texts and transferred to the blog.

These articles will go, with the purpose, to encourage those who read them the devotion in your hearts to the true devotions to Our Lady and against the current "modern devotio" that has emerged in order to eliminate what the Catholic Church has recommended here and in all parts of the Catholic world of yesteryear.

I want to start the delivery of these articles with the apparitions of Our Lady of Guadalupe, already well known by many, it never hurts to always remember them again under another aspect without missing the truth of these apparitions.

I. THE VIRGIN OF GUADALUPE

IN MEXICO

Our Lady's interventions in history are always delicious. Many times with prodigious cures, among which the miracle of Calanda de la Virgen del Pilar stands out. Other times with messages for our salvation, like the very important one from Fatima. In Mexico the apparitions of St. Mary in order to convert the indigenous people to Catholicism, have a special stamp, her own portrait of her, and seeing her image will be enough to take us to Jesus; ¡The Mother of God can do so much with just her figure!

 We are going to know the history, beginning with the antecedents that frame it.

One Good Friday, April 22, 1519, 26 years after Columbus discovered America, another great conqueror, the Extremaduran Hernán Cortés, landed in Mexico, in Veracruz. With few men, great audacity and military genius, he entered Mexico City on August 13, 1521, quickly conquering territories greater than Spain, with the known vicissitudes of his "sad night", the burning of ships, etc…

About the culture, political organization and religion of the various peoples that inhabited those lands, we take from one of his descendants, Professor Ceferino Salmerón:

Mexico, strictly speaking, was nothing more than a city of Tenochtitlan, homeland of the Aztecs; to the west the kingdom of Tacuba and the Tarasco, to the east that of Texcoco; the Mayans, who did not form a kingdom, to the southwest, in the Yucatan peninsula; in the south the Mixtec and Zapotec kingdoms; all independent of the Aztecs: «Tribes and semi-civilized peoples, lived in a most miserable and rudimentary way. Their scarce and poor diet basically consisted of corn cakes, beans, chili, wild herbs, plant roots and a variety of vermin. They did not know wheat bread, the variety of meats from four-legged domesticated animals, grape wine, fats and olive oil, cow or goat milk, because cattle and goats did not exist here.

Spain, his daughter New Spain, populated it with all kinds of plants and fruit trees, such as citrus fruits, apples, pears, bananas and vines, coconut palms and sugar cane. She introduced cereals, unknown among the natives, such as wheat and barley, rye and rice. And as for the cattle, he introduced in abundance, in Mexico, the pig, the goat, the sheep, the cattle and the horse, the mule and the donkey, that here there was not a single one of those animals so useful to men in all walks of life.

Spain taught the indigenous the use of the wheel, which he had never put into practice, and whose ignorance kept him stuck in an irreparable delay; but he also taught the conquered indigenous peoples the apprenticeship of European handicrafts and industries, which did them so much good. Finally, Spain taught the indigenous peoples to improve their diet, their rooms and their way of dressing, using fabrics and cloths and suits that they did not know before the conquest, and for which reason they were naked or semi-naked. Some of them, with their hieroglyphic writing, had passed from the prehistoric to the protohistoric period.

The great indigenist culture, especially the Aztec, about which North American, English and French writers speak so much, is nothing more than a great myth, and a myth with all the signs and fur of anti-Catholicism and anti-Hispanism. Because to speak of such a culture one would have to ask: Where is its alphabet? Where his works of literature, philosophy, history, mathematics, eloquence and geometry? Where his masterpieces of architecture, sculpture and painting that rivaled the European ones of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries? The natives were submerged in the most dense and degrading paganism. Human sacrifice, cannibalism, unrestrained drunkenness, sodomy, and sorcery were the ruling passions of the souls and bodies of the inhabitants of this enormous region of the New World. The Aztec people were the first in such degrading practices. On the eve of the discovery of the New World, in 1487, Ahuítzotl, the eighth Aztec king, had sacrificed to Huitzilopochtli, god of war, at least twenty thousand human victims in four consecutive days». So far the Mexican teacher.

This was the historical reality that is important to know. Three centuries later, when in 1821 Mexico broke its political unity with the Crown of Spain, it had four and a half million km2 of whose civilization are perennial testimonies of its language, its literature, its grandiose temples full of artistic objects... (In 1848, when Mexico separated from Spain, the United States seized nearly two and a half million kms.2: Texas, New Mexico, California...)

The evangelization of the Indians already began Fray Bartolomé de Olmedo, Mercedarian, chaplain of the Spanish army. In 1524 the Franciscans arrived, and later other orders and priests would follow. But ten years later, in 1531, even conversions were few, when a prodigious intervention by the Queen of Heaven was to radically change the religious situation.

The oldest account we have of the prodigious event was written by an Indian, D. Antonio Valeriano, a native of Atzacpotzalco, a relative of Emperor Moctezuma. From the age of ten to twelve he received primary instruction from the Franciscan missionaries in a house next to the convent of S. Francisco, and when the Colegio de Sta. Cruz de Tlatelolco was founded in 1535, he was one of the first schoolboys. He excelled so much in the study of the Mexican, Latin, and Castilian languages, in rhetoric, philosophy, and history, that he deserved to succeed his own teachers in teaching schoolchildren; for the «Codice de Santiago», in January 1552, mentions Valeriano with the title of reader. He also took him as a collaborator for his great work General History of the things of New Spain, the famous Franciscan Fray Bernardino de Sahagún. Because of his prudence, right judgment and knowledge of things, he was Governor of the Indians for 32 years from January 1573 until August 1605, when he died. He governed with great acceptance and edification of all, for which Felipe II himself wrote him a very favorable letter, doing him many favors in it.

This Indian, educated thanks to the conquerors, wrote his report between 1545 and 1550, in Nahuatl, the language of the Mexica or Mexican Indians. This relationship passed into the hands of D. Fernando de Alba Ixtlixóchitl (1568-1648), grandson, on his father's side, of the kings of Texcoco, the history of whose kingdom he wrote, and, on his mother's side (the aforementioned princess Papantzin). of Cuitláhuac, penultimate emperor of Mexico. D. Fernando added some miracles to the manuscript, and when he died he bequeathed it, with all his papers, to Fr. Carlos Sigüenza y Góngora, a former Jesuit who later died in the Society of Jesus, and then passed to the library of the Jesuit College of Mexico. When they were expelled from Mexico by Carlos III in 1767, they went to the University of Mexico, from where General Scott took them to Washington in 1847. There the original is lost, but it was published in 1649 by the bachelor Luis Lasso de la Vega, priest of Guadalupe from 1647 to 1657. His ecclesiastical censor, Fr. Baltasar González, SJ, rector of the College of Indians and notable Mexicanist, said of him: «I find this relation adjusted to what by tradition and annals is known of the fact». The first translation appeared already in 1648, by the work of Fr. Miguel Sánchez, an oratorian, tangled, with many scholarly additions; in 1675 another, only partially literal, was made by Luis Becerra Tanco, a Filipino priest, professor of Aztec language at the University of Mexico, very well written (cf. in the History of the Cult of Mary in Ibero-America, Rubén Vargas Ugarte, SJ , 3rd edition volume 1, Lima-Madrid 1956). But the translation that best preserves the Indian style (with its delicacy and its diminutives, that have influenced so much in the Spanish of Mexico), and currently the ordinary one, is that of the licensed Primo Feliciano Velázquez (Mexico 1926); however, strangely, its Castilian is archaic, which is why we retouched it with Becerra's version in front of us, as well as Velázquez's erudite linguistic notes (The appearance of Sta. María de Guadalupe, Mexico 1931), and the new, more literal translation. , of Rev. Mario Rojas. The relationship of the Valeriano Indian is known by the name of his first two words: NICAN MOPOHUA, which means: "Here it refers." the erudite linguistic notes by Velázquez himself (The appearance of Sta. María de Guadalupe, Mexico 1931), and the new, more literal translation by Rev. Mario Rojas. The relationship of the Valeriano Indian is known by the name of his first two words: NICAN MOPOHUA, which means: "Here it refers." the erudite linguistic notes by Velázquez himself (The appearance of Sta. María de Guadalupe, Mexico 1931), and the new, more literal translation by Rev. Mario Rojas. The relationship of the Valeriano Indian is known by the name of his first two words: NICAN MOPOHUA, which means: "Here it refers."

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* Mexicas: those born from the nopalera (= site of nopales, species of prickly pears) because, according to legends, they settled where they saw an eagle eat a snake in a nopalera. The city: Mexiquic = next to the nopalera. Also called Aztecs: those who came from Aztlán = place of the herons).

The Toltecs, —populators before the Aztecs— spoke of a bearded white man, who preached good, founded a city, and disappeared across the eastern sea (Gulf of Mexico) promising to return. This character was deified and identified with the sun. (Cf. A great sign appeared in the sky, Sta. Cruz Altillo, Mexico 1976).

According to Fernando de Alva Ixtlixóchitl in his Historia Chichimeca, Netzahualcóyotl, a philosopher king, came to the concept of the invisible God, creator of all things, whom he worshipped. One night a resplendent young man appeared to his page Iztapalotzin who told him that he was sent by the Almighty God, who had been pleased with his lord's offerings, and for this reason one of his sons would defeat the king of Chalco (who had sacrificed two of his sons) and would have another son who would succeed him. Both things happened, and so he built a temple to the unknown God, creator of all things. A young man dressed in white, with feathered wings and a cross on his forehead, sent by the true invisible God, also appeared to Papantzin, Moctezuma's sister, already apparently dead: The princess saw several galleys in the sea, with men white helmets and flags with the cross. "Those men will conquer this land and bring the worship of the true God, creator of heaven and earth, who wants you to be the first to receive the water that washes away sin». In fact, she was later baptized with the name Doña María, along with her nephew Antonio Valeriano.