Yes, I’m sorry, I was incorrect, he was in Mexico earlier, before he went back to Spain, so he could have been around in 1531, I suppose, granting audiences to Aztec peasants. If so, it’s strange that he never seemed to mention this most dramatic event in any of his writings. There are other problems in the account, though, that I find hard to dismiss. For example, claiming the image is miraculous, when it’s clearly a fairly crude painting, is a rather large one.
As for the manuscript, it’s dated to 1556, but that’s just an estimate. We have no date in the manuscript, no author, and no provenance, so it’s an educated guess that may be accurate, or not. We do know for certain that a cult of Guadalupe was mentioned in 1556, by Bustamante, who denounced it as falsely attributing a painting of Mary made by an Indian as a miraculous relic. That sure sounds familiar. I wouldn’t be surprised if that cult had written down its fantasy in manuscript form at some point, and that is what became the basis for the 1649 account.
Particularly when the person who did so, was a Nahuatl-speaking Aztec who was seeing visions on the Hill of Tepeyac, formerly sacred to the goddess Tonantzin.
These were the guys who twice imprisoned St. Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the Jesuits, fer Chrissake (so to speak!)
Nope, Zumarraga was not going to be trumpeting that perplexing Indio business to the gents over at the Tribunal del Santo Oficio de la Inquisición.
But he did enjoy the most amazing increase of new converts since Pentecost AD 33. According to Fray Toribio de Benavente Motolinia, the number of baptized Indians in Mexico in 1536 was five million.
I will permit myself a little childish punctuation: !!!!!
Happy New Year, Boogieman.