Nine witnesses swear to what a friar preached against the Tepeyac chapel

MEXICO CITY, New Spain, September 1556 AD — The Archbishop of Mexico has put nine men on oath to settle what the head of the Franciscans in New Spain said from the pulpit against the chapel at Tepeyac. Fourteen questions were drawn up in writing and put to each man in turn, and each answered them and signed his name to the answers. The answers hold more than the friar’s attack. One of the nine swore that great ladies of this city were walking out to the chapel barefoot, with staves in their hands.

The chapel stands on the plain at the foot of the hill of Tepeyac, up the causeway north of this city. The Blessed Virgin Mary appeared to Saint Juan Diego Cuauhtlatoatzin on that hill twenty-five years ago and asked for a church on the plain beside it. St. Juan Diego looked after the chapel until his death in 1548 AD, when he was buried inside it. Until recently the chapel and the people who came to it were the Franciscans’ charge.

The second Archbishop of Mexico, Fray Alonso de Montúfar, a Dominican, took the chapel out of Franciscan hands. That set him against Fray Francisco de Bustamante, the Franciscan provincial, who governs the whole order in New Spain. Bustamante calls the devotion idolatry and wants the pilgrims stopped. He has the pulpits of his own order behind him, and the Franciscans have had the care of the native people in this valley since their first missionaries reached the region in 1524 AD. Montúfar wants the devotion defended. He holds the shrine, and he can take evidence on oath.

The quarrel came into the open earlier this month. Montúfar preached in this city in support of the devotion, taking as his text “Blessed are the eyes that see what you see”. Two days later Bustamante answered him from the pulpit of San José de los Naturales (Saint Joseph of the native people), in the Franciscan convent here. The viceroy, Don Luis de Velasco, and other notables of the city sat in front of him.

Bustamante accused the archbishop of fostering idolatry by supporting the devotion. He said the image at Tepeyac had been painted by a native painter named Marcos. He also let his hearers understand that the alms left at the shrine were not being properly used.

The next day Montúfar ordered an Información (an inquiry) drawn up. The order stated what it was for: to learn from witnesses, sworn beforehand to tell the truth, what the provincial had actually said. A diocesan inquiry of that kind runs to a fixed shape. The questions are settled in advance, in a written interrogatory, so that every man is asked the same thing in the same words. The oath comes before the answers, not after. Each witness answers article by article and puts his mark to each one. Fourteen articles were prepared, and all nine of the men examined answered and signed.

One of the nine, Juan de Salazar, testified to what the devotion at Tepeyac now looks like from the streets of this city: “the great devotion that this whole city has taken to this blessed image, and the Indians too, and how great ladies, delicately raised, go barefoot and on foot with their staves in their hands to visit Our Lady and commend themselves to her; and from this the native people have taken great example and do the same.”

That was the traffic Bustamante preached against. People have gone out to Tepeyac almost without a break since the year of the apparitions. The chapel at the foot of the hill was built in 1532 AD.

Another of the nine, Francisco de Salazar, swore that the sermon had not slowed the walking out to the chapel, and that the scandal had done the opposite: “Because of the scandal there was over the objection he made, nothing else is spoken of now but this: that however much it grieves Bustamante, we are to go and serve Our Lady wherever her image is, and let him contradict the devotion as much as he likes — if anything, he gives us to understand that what grieves him is that Spaniards go there. From now on, if we used to go once, we will go four times.”