page_title: Juan Diego
section_title: Historicity debate
hierarchical_section_title: Juan Diego / Historicity debate
caption_attribution_description: English: Nican Mopohua
context_page_description: Saint Juan Diego Cuauhtlatoatzin, also known as Juan Diego, a native of Mexico, is the first Catholic indigenous saint from the Americas. He is said to have been granted an apparition of the Virgin Mary on four separate occasions in December 1531 at the hill of Tepeyac, then a rural area but now within the borders of Mexico City. The Basilica of Guadalupe, located at the foot of Tepeyac, claims to possess Juan Diego's mantle or cloak on which an image of the Virgin is said to have been impressed by a miracle as a pledge of the authenticity of the apparitions.
  These apparitions and the imparting of the miraculous image are together known as the Guadalupe event, and are the basis of the veneration of Our Lady of Guadalupe. This veneration is ubiquitous in Mexico, prevalent throughout the Spanish-speaking Americas, and increasingly widespread beyond. As a result, the Basilica of Guadalupe is now one of the world's major centre of pilgrimage for Catholics, receiving 22 million visitors in 2010.
  Juan Diego was beatified in 1990 and canonized in 2002.
context_section_description: The debate over the historicity of St. Juan Diego and, by extension, of the apparitions and the miraculous image, begins with a contemporary to Juan Diego, named Antonio Valeriano. Valeriano was one of the best Indian scholars at the College of Santiago de Tlatelolco at the time that Juan Diego was alive; he was proficient in Spanish as well as Latin, and a native speaker of Nahuatl. He knew Juan Diego personally
   and wrote his account of the apparitions on the basis of Juan Diego's testimony. A copy of Valeriano's document was rediscovered by Jesuit Father Ernest J. Burrus in the New York Public Library.
  Some objections to the historicity of the Guadalupe event, grounded in the silence of the very sources which – it is argued – are those most likely to have referred to it, were raised as long ago as 1794 by Juan Bautista Muñoz and were expounded in detail by Mexican historian Joaquín García Icazbalceta in a confidential report dated 1883 commissioned by the then Archbishop of Mexico and first published in 1896. The silence of the sources is discussed in a separate section, below. The most prolific contemporary protagonist in the debate is Stafford Poole, a historian and Vincentian priest in the United States of America, who questioned the integrity and rigor of the historical investigation conducted by the Catholic Church in the interval between Juan Diego's beatification and his canonization.
  For a brief period in mid-1996 a vigorous debate was ignited in Mexico when it emerged that Guillermo Schulenburg, who at that time was 80 years of age, did not believe that Juan Diego was a historical person or (which follows from it) that it is his mantle which is conserved and venerated at the Basilica. That debate, however, was focused not so much on the weight to be accorded to the historical sources which attest to Juan Diego's existence as on the propriety of Abbot Schulenburg retaining an official position which – so it was objected – his advanced age, allegedly extravagant life-style and heterodox views disqualified him from holding. Abbot Schulenburg's resignation (announced on September 6, 1996) terminated that debate. The scandal, however, re-erupted in January 2002 when the Italian journalist Andrea Tornielli published in the Italian newspaper Il Giornale a confidential letter dated December 4, 2001, which Schulenburg (among others) had sent to Cardinal Sodano, the then Secretary of State at the Vatican, reprising reservations over the historicity of Juan Diego.
  Partly in response to these and other issues, the Congregation for the Causes of Saints (the body within the Catholic Church with oversight of the process of approving candidates for sainthood) reopened the historical phase of the investigation in 1998, and in November of that year declared itself satisfied with the results. Following the canonization in 2002, the Catholic Church considers the question closed.
caption: Copy of Huei tlamahuiçoltica preserved at the New York Library
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