The pope's new conquest
John Paul II canonizes a make-believe saint, beatifies two stool pigeons, and proclaims a new evangelization of Indian America.

By John Ross

Editor's note: The recent travels of Pope John Paul II have made front-page headlines around the nation. Most of the stories have speculated on the pope's health and his future and have said little about the geopolitics of his missions. Our Mexico City correspondent has a different perspective.

MEXICO CITY &# 150; As the crowning point of almost certainly his last trip to the Americas, during which he studiously avoided the United States and its lurid pederast priest scandals, an enfeebled Pope John Paul II early in August came to Mexico, the site of his very first papal visit 97 junkets and 23 years ago, to canonize a make-believe saint, beatify two stool pigeons, and proclaim a new evangelization of Latin America's 40 million Indians.

The freshly anointed St. Juan Diego (whose life will be honored Dec. 9 on the church calendar) was purportedly an Aztec Indian to whom the dark-skinned Virgin of Guadalupe appeared in 1531, leaving her image miraculously imprinted upon the Indian's cactus-fiber cloak. The visitation became the cornerstone of the Catholic evangelization of the New World's native peoples – and the ecclesiastical equivalent of a European conquest and consequent holocaust that cost the lives of between 12 million and 25 million Indians in Mexico alone during the first 160 years of colonial domination.

The canonization of Juan Diego, the continent's first Indian saint, was consummated, fittingly enough, at the Basilica of the Virgin of Guadalupe, Christendom's second most lucrative shrine, built atop Tepeyac Hill, where the "Brown Madonna" first visited the Indian at the site of an altar dedicated to the ancient Aztec earth mother Tonantzin.

The tone of the long-awaited canonization was set by the logo the church designed for the historic visit: a large, white-clad John Paul looming over a kneeling "Indian" whose racial characteristics seem closer to those of the Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés than to those of the Aztec emperor Montezuma II.

In addition to the presence of bishops and cardinals from all over Mexico and Latin America, the canonization was attended by President Vicente Fox, most of his cabinet, and bigwigs in his conservative National Action Party (PAN). The president shocked advocates of a clear separation between church and state in this overwhelmingly Catholic republic by kneeling to kiss the Pope's ring.

Holy forgery!

The first recorded mention of the legend of the Virgin of Guadalupe and Juan Diego dates from 1660, 130 years after the alleged miracle took place. The principle evidence of Juan Diego's historic existence is the volume Nican Mopohua (Herein It Is Foretold, in Nahuatl), said to be originally inscribed in 1555 by an Indian poet, but almost certainly a fake, according to Cambridge University Guadalupoligist David Brading, who attributes the forgery to Miguel Sanchez, a 17th-century priest and chief promoter of the Guadalupana cult. Brading also asserts that a long-lost codex depicting the miracle, which turned up on a priest's doorstep in 1995 and which has been submitted as corroborating evidence, is also counterfeit.

According to José Antonio Flores, a prominent restorer of sacred art twice summoned to the basilica to touch up Juan Diego's questionably miraculous tilma, or cloak (the Mexican church's most sacrosanct icon, which hangs behind the main altar), the garment was "painted by human hands," most probably by the Indian artist Marcos Cipac. Sworn to secrecy by the basilica's then-abbot Guillermo Schulemberg, Flores revealed his findings on the eve of the pope's visit. Unlike in the case of the Shroud of Turin, the church has refused to permit scientific analysis of the tilma.

Schulemberg himself, who amassed a personal fortune as abbot of the basilica for 34 years, denied Juan Diego's historical existence, a prerequisite for sainthood. For that, Schulemberg was vilified and eventually removed – "as [were] all who refused to accept the miracle," U.S. Catholic theologian Gary Wills recently wrote in the New York Times. Indeed, Mexico City cardinal Norberto Rivera has threatened excommunication for those who continue to deny the legitimacy of St. Juan Diego.

But whether Juan Diego existed or not is no longer really an issue. Latin America's first Indian saint is clearly a symbol – but of what? Church leaders like Rivera insist that Juan Diego's canonization "dignifies" the social status of all Indians. Detractors argue that the new saint only institutionalizes a cruel trick played on the indigenous population of the Americas to bring them to the church, often through brutally enforced conversions.

Denial of resistance

Miguel León Portillo, Mexico's most respected translator of Aztec poetry, decries the church's portrayal of Indian submissiveness so graphically illustrated by the Juan Diego logo. "This is a denial of Indian resistance to the conquest, a process that continues today in Chiapas with the self-assertion of the Mayan people through the Zapatista Army of National Liberation," he says.

The church's vision that the only good Indian is a submissive one has really not changed since 1531, observes Jan de Vos, a former Jesuit and a historian of indigenous movements in the jungles of Chiapas, who worries about the political use of Juan Diego in the church's battle for the hearts and minds – and souls – of Mexico's 10 million to 20 million Indians.

In recent years much of the church's battle for Indian souls has been focused on Chiapas, where the Vatican forced the retirement of liberation theologist Bishop Samuel Ruiz, sent his handpicked successor off to the northern desert, and now seeks to dismantle the autoctona, or Indian church, that the rebellious Ruiz constructed. A ban on the ordination of Indian deacons has been imposed on this heavily Indian diocese by the Vatican.

Two stool pigeons

Juan Diego was not the only Indian elevated to the church's pantheon during John Paul's recent sojourn. The beatification of the "martyrs of Oaxaca," Juan Bautista and Jacinto de los Angeles, also touched a sensitive nerve. The new beatos were fiscales, or enforcers, for Spanish authorities in the Zapotec mountain town of San Francisco Cojonos, Oaxaca. On Sept. 14, 1700, the two men informed their superiors that townspeople were conducting pagan sacrifices, and Spanish soldiers were sent to repress the ceremony. Enraged Zapotecs resisted, and the invaders retreated, leaving the stool pigeons to defend themselves. They were later sacrificed on a nearby hill, and the church maintains the offenders drank the Christians' blood.

Spanish authorities subsequently returned and cut off the heads of 15 alleged perpetrators, chopped their body parts into pieces, and hung the pieces up by the roadside as a warning to all those who would offend the Catholic faith. Others were whipped and their houses demolished.

The beatification of the martyrs of Cojonos "signals the new evangelization of the Indians of the Americas," Oaxaca archbishop Hector Gonzalez pronounced from the high altar of the basilica to a dozing John Paul this past Aug. 1. The blessing of the bones of the fiscales by the drooling pope triggered a wild, incense-filled celebration that contrasted sharply with the ceremonies staged for Fox government officials at Juan Diego's canonization the day before.

But the beatification of the martyrs of Cojonos did not please everyone back home in the Sierra Norte of Oaxaca. "The fiscales were considered great traitors to their race back then," 82-year-old town historian Wilfredo Ortiz was quoted as saying in Proceso magazine. "They are symbols of the conquest – how can the Pope beatify them?"

Says Jacobo, a young Zapotec lawyer, who is also not a believer, "I can't see how beatifying these soplones [stool pigeons] helps us. We don't need a saint – we need economic development."

Baltazar explains that agricultural crisis and a lack of government credits has driven many farmers from San Francisco Cojones to migrate to the United States, and the money they send home is now the town's most important source of income. Ironically, he adds, many of the men come home converts to Protestantism.