Archbishop backs the chapel outside the city; a friar calls it idolatry

MEXICO CITY, September 8, 1556 AD — Twenty-five years ago the Blessed Virgin Mary appeared on the hill of Tepeyac, three miles up the causeway from this city, to a poor man of the people named Saint Juan Diego Cuauhtlatoatzin. Our Lady sent him to the first Bishop of Mexico, Fray Juan de Zumárraga, to ask for a church at the foot of the hill. She left her image on St. Juan Diego’s cloak. An adobe chapel went up on the plain below the hill the following year. St. Juan Diego left his house and lands to his uncle, moved into a hut beside the chapel, and looked after it and the people who came. He died there in 1548, at about seventy-four, and was buried inside the church he had kept.

That chapel is now the ground of an open quarrel between the Archbishop of Mexico and the head of the Franciscans in New Spain. On Sunday the second Archbishop of Mexico, Fray Alonso de Montúfar, preached in the city in support of the devotion at Tepeyac. He took as his text “Blessed are the eyes that see what you see.” Today the Franciscan provincial, Fray Francisco de Bustamante, answered him from another pulpit.

Today is the feast of the Nativity of Mary, on which Our Lady of Guadalupe is kept along with the other titles of Our Lady that have no feast of their own. Bustamante preached in the chapel of San José de los Naturales (Saint Joseph of the native people), inside the Franciscan convent in this city. The viceroy of New Spain, Don Luis de Velasco, and other notables of the city sat in front of him. He ended with a direct attack on the archbishop. Bustamante accused Montúfar of fostering idolatry by supporting the devotion, and said the image at Tepeyac had been painted by a native painter named Marcos. He also made it plain that in his view the archbishop was misusing the alms left at the shrine.

The quarrel did not begin on Sunday. Montúfar took the hermitage at Tepeyac out of the jurisdiction of the Franciscans, and that is what set him against Bustamante. Until then the chapel, the image and the pilgrims who came to it were the friars’ charge. They are the archbishop’s now.

Montúfar is a Dominican, twice prior of the convent of Santa Cruz de Granada. He was named to the see of Mexico on June 13, 1551. His time as archbishop here began in 1554. The see he came to was new. Mexico had been raised to an archdiocese on February 11, 1546. Zumárraga died on June 3, 1548, a month before the bull naming him its first archbishop was sent from Rome.

Montúfar inherited a metropolitan church in a country the friars had evangelized and still largely run. The Franciscans, Dominicans and Augustinians exercise a jurisdiction that does not pass through the archbishop, and the secular clergy resent it. In November of last year Montúfar opened a council of the province in this city. The bishops of Tlaxcala, Chiapas, Michoacán and Oaxaca attended, with the viceroy, the royal high court and other officials of the Church and the crown. Ninety-three chapters of rules came out of it. He has also pressed for tithes to be levied on the native people for the support of the bishops. The crown has refused to allow it.

The Franciscans have been preaching in this valley since 1524, seven years before the Blessed Virgin Mary appeared on the hill, and the care of the native people here has been theirs from the beginning.

The archbishop is not letting the sermon rest. He is to open a formal enquiry into what Bustamante said, and to take the evidence of witnesses on oath.

People have gone to the chapel at Tepeyac almost without a break since 1531 or 1532.