Nine men, fourteen questions — then six words ended it

MEXICO, New Spain, September 24, 1556 AD — The chapel at Tepeyac used to be in the care of the Franciscan friars. Then the Archbishop of Mexico, Fray Alonso de Montúfar, took it away from them. That is what set him against Fray Francisco de Bustamante, who is in charge of all the Franciscans in New Spain.

Montúfar holds the chapel now, and the money people leave there. He wants people to go on honouring the Blessed Virgin Mary at Tepeyac. Bustamante says that money would do more good in this city’s hospitals, and among its poor, than on journeys out to Tepeyac.

The chapel stands on the flat ground below the hill of Tepeyac, up the causeway north of this city. That is where the Blessed Virgin Mary appeared to St. Juan Diego Cuauhtlatoatzin in December 1531 AD. She asked that a church be built for her there. A chapel has stood on the spot since the year after that.

On September 6 Montúfar preached in this city in support of the chapel. He took as his text “Blessed are the eyes that see what you see”. Two days later Bustamante preached back at him, from a pulpit in the Franciscan convent here. The viceroy, Don Luis de Velasco, and the leading men of the city sat listening.

He told them the whole devotion had been begun with nothing behind it. The picture at the chapel, he said, had been painted by a native painter named Marcos. He said nobody knew where the money taken to the chapel was going. He let the people listening think the archbishop was spending it wrongly. All this walking out to Tepeyac, he said, was hurting the native people badly.

People who had heard him carried written complaints to the archbishop the same day. The next day Montúfar ordered an enquiry, to find out from sworn witnesses what Bustamante had really said. Fourteen questions were written out. Nine men came in and swore to tell the truth. They answered all fourteen questions in turn, and signed what they had said.

The archbishop writes it himself

Then, today, Montúfar stopped the whole thing, in his own handwriting. Six words: “Suspéndase y la parte es muerto” (Let it be suspended, and the party is dead).

Bustamante was the man all fourteen questions were about. He was alive, and still in charge of the Franciscans of New Spain. Montúfar never said who he meant. He never said why he was stopping a case he had ordered himself. The viceroy has had to step into the argument between the two men. Nobody has punished the archbishop for anything Bustamante said about him.

While the two churchmen argued over the chapel and the money left in it, people went on walking out to it. They have done so almost every year since the Blessed Virgin Mary appeared there. St. Juan Diego served at that chapel to the end of his life, and he is buried inside it.