Archbishop halts the sworn enquiry he ordered into the sermon against Tepeyac

MEXICO, New Spain, September 24, 1556 AD — The Archbishop of Mexico stopped his own sworn enquiry today into what the head of the Franciscans in New Spain had preached against the chapel at Tepeyac. Fray Alonso de Montúfar had opened it fifteen days ago to establish the friar’s words on oath. Today he ended it, with one line in his own hand.

The chapel stands on the plain below the hill of Tepeyac, up the causeway north of this city, where the Blessed Virgin Mary appeared to Saint Juan Diego Cuauhtlatoatzin in December 1531 AD and asked that a church be built for her there. It has stood on the spot since the year after the apparitions.

The Franciscans had charge of the chapel until Montúfar, the second Archbishop of Mexico, took it away from them. That is what set him against Fray Francisco de Bustamante, who governs the Franciscans of New Spain as their provincial. Bustamante says there was never any real basis for the devotion. The money left at the chapel, he says, would do more good in the hospitals and among the poor of this city than on pilgrimages to it. Montúfar wants the devotion defended, and he holds the chapel and the alms left in it.

The quarrel came into the open eighteen days ago. On September 6 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, on the feast of the Nativity of Mary, 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 were in front of him. Bustamante told them the archbishop was fostering idolatry by backing the devotion, and that the image at Tepeyac had been painted by a native painter named Marcos. He said too that no one knew what became of the money taken to the chapel, giving them to understand that the archbishop was disposing of the alms improperly. The devotion this city had taken up there, he said, was doing the native people great harm.

People who had heard the sermon brought written complaints to Montúfar the same day. An archbishop can summon men, put them on oath and have their answers written down. The next day Montúfar ordered it done, to learn from sworn witnesses what the provincial had actually said. Fourteen questions were written out, and nine men were brought in and sworn, asked the fourteen questions in turn, and made to sign their answers.

Then today Montúfar set the whole proceeding aside with six words in his own hand: “Suspéndase y la parte es muerto” (Let it be suspended, and the party is dead). Bustamante is alive and still governs his province. The viceroy has had to step into the quarrel between the two men, and nothing has been done to the archbishop over either charge. Montúfar did not say which party he meant, or why he stopped the proceeding he had ordered.

People are still walking out to the chapel at the foot of the hill, as they have almost without a break since the year of the apparitions. St. Juan Diego served at that chapel to the end of his life, and he is buried inside it.