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Divine Idea and ‘our Mother’: Elite and Popular Understanding in the Cult of Our Lady of Guadalupe of Mexico*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 March 2016

D. A. Brading*
Affiliation:
Clare Hall, University of Cambridge

Extract

In 1648 the creole elite of Mexico City was enthralled to learn that in December 1531 the Virgin Mary had appeared to a poor Indian and had miraculously imprinted on his cape the likeness of herself, which was still venerated in the chapel at Tepeyac just outside the city limits. The moment was opportune, since in 1622 Archbishop Juan Pérez de la Serna had completed the construction of a new sanctuary devoted to Our Lady of Guadalupe and in 1629 the image had been brought to the cathedral in a vain attempt to lower the flood waters that engulfed the capital for four years. In effect, Image of the Virgin Mary, Mother of God of Guadalupe (1648) was a heartfelt response to the growth in devotion to the Mexican Virgin; and its author, Miguel Sánchez, wrote as if inspired by a particular revelation, since his only guides were oral tradition and the stimulus of other apparition narratives. A creole priest, renowned for his piety, patriotism and great learning, Sánchez appears to have modelled his account on Murillo’s history of Our Lady of Pilar and her apparition at Zaragoza to St James, which is to say, to Santiago, the patron saint of Spain.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 2006

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Footnotes

*

This paper in part summarizes material and arguments presented in my Mexican Phoenix. Our Lady of Guadalupe: Image and Tradition across Five Centuries (Cambridge, 2001).

References

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2 At this time the term sobrenombre could indicate an epithet, a title or a surname.

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40 Ibid., 4–5.

41 Ibid., 23–6.

42 Ibid., 27–8.

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46 The text is repr. in Testimonios históricos, 282–308; see also the variant translations in Jesús Galera Lamadrid, Nican mopohua: breve análisis literario e histórico (Mexico, 1991), 136–7, in which, together with the Náhuatl original, he prints in parallel columns the translations by Luis Becerra Tanco (1675), Primo Feliciano Velasquez (1926), Angel María Garibay (1978) and Mario Rojas Sánchez (1978).

47 Ibid., 140–1.

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58 Francisco Javier Lazcano, S.J., Sermón panegyrico al ínclito patronato de María Señora Nuestra en su milagrosísima imagen de Guadalupe sobre la universal Septentrional América (Mexico, 1759), passim.Google Scholar

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60 Ibid., meditation for 12 October.

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63 Ibid., 1209–10.

64 Brading, , Mexican Phoenix, 31316, 336.Google Scholar