- Email: [email protected]
The limits of Catholic science and the Mexican Revolution
Feature
Endeavour
Vol.34 No.2
The limits of Catholic science and the Mexican Revolution Aaron Van Oosterhout and Benjamin T. Smith* Department of History, Michigan State University, United States
This article examines the church’s embrace of scientific methodologies in the late nineteenth century. It is argued that in general, the shift worked to repel liberal ridicule and control popular devotions. However, in Mexico the effects were mixed. During the Mexican Revolution, a desperate church was forced to apply these new scientific methodologies to increasingly unauthorized cults. On 20 April 1911, a priest, Francisco Herna´ndez, arrived in Tzocuilac, a barrio of Cholula, just southwest of the Mexican city of Puebla, to verify a miraculous painting of the Virgin Mary. Ultimately, Herna´ndez would learn the long history of the Virgin of Tzocuilac, encompassing three hundred years of salvations from droughts, war, and epidemics. But, rather than accepting the miracles as examples of divine intervention or dismissing them as the simple imaginings of semi-pagan peasants, Herna´ndez brought to bear a rigorous investigative methodology which included interviews with devotees, statements of medical conditions, and affidavits from medical doctors. The inquiry would last two years. Despite Herna´ndez’s self-conscious employment of modern scientific methodologies, in the end all doubts were quashed and he reported to his superiors that the image truly possessed miraculous powers. Why did the Catholic church, usually so impervious to accusations of traditionalism, seek to employ modern science to prove something so rooted in faith as miraculous cures? Furthermore, having gone to so much effort, why did they still accept the miracles as valid? During the nineteenth century, Catholic countries throughout Europe and Latin America experienced a series of what Christopher Clark and Wolfram Kaiser have dubbed ‘‘culture wars’’, which pitted Enlightenment ideas against the increasingly dogmatic assertions of the Catholic church.1 The most vociferous and occasionally violent debates concerned issues of church-state governance, such as clerical privilege, church wealth, and education. However, this escalating war of words also set in opposition rational scientific methodologies and the more extreme examples of faith-based epistemology. With the election of the Italian Pontiff, Pius IX (1846–1878), the rivals reached a high point of polarization. Under pressure by liberal forces in Italy and throughout Europe, Pius IX engaged in what Margaret Lavinia Anderson calls ‘‘an experimental ‘‘let’s-try-it-on-for-size’’ willingness to defend *Corresponding author.Smith, B.T. ([email protected]) Christopher Clark and Wolfram Kaiser (eds.), Culture Wars, Secular-Catholic Conflict in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 1
www.sciencedirect.com
the indefensible’’.2 His ultramontane followers not only refused any dialogue with suspected liberal states, they also exalted in the church’s celebration of the supposedly miraculous. For example in 1854 Pius IX published Ineffabilis Deus, which raised the Immaculate Conception from a shared Catholic belief to a dogma of the Catholic church. A decade later he published the encyclical, Syllabus Errorum, which reached a reactionary zenith in its last article which condemned all those who stated that the Pope ‘‘could or ought to reconcile himself, and come to terms with, progress, liberalism and modern civilization’’. As if to prove the point, six years later at the First Vatican Council Pius IX passed the dogma of papal infallibility, which declared the pope was free from error when deciding on issues of the Catholic church.3 Beyond the Vatican, in the rural villages and parish chapels which formed the Catholic Church’s heartland, priests and parishioners also reacted to liberal derision by emphasizing progressively more extraordinary popular devotions. Most famously in 1858 a 14-year-old girl, Bernadette Soubirous, claimed that the Virgin Mary appeared to her in a grotto near the small French town of Lourdes on seventeen occasions (Figure 1). Two years later the local bishop verified the apparitions and by the late nineteenth century thousands of pilgrims were arriving at the sanctuary by train to seek its miraculous cures.4 Over the next half-century the church embraced countless other Marian apparitions, encouraging a veritable thaumaturgical tsunami throughout conflictive areas of Europe. For example in 1870 children in the French town of Pontmain ‘‘saw’’ an apparition of the Virgin in the sky, which enjoined them to prayer, and in, return, saved the town from Prussian bombardment.5 In 1876, at the height of the Prussian Kulturkampf, three girls experienced visions of the Virgin in the small town of Marpingen.6 As elite and popular Catholics locked into a spiral of escalating mysticism, liberals looked on with contempt, mocking the institution’s dogmatic adherence to the improbable and the impossible. In France, radical journalists derided the infallible Pope as the ‘‘Vice-God’’, the Trinity as ‘‘the owner of the universe, a
2 Margaret Lavinia Anderson ‘‘The Divisions of the Pope: The Catholic Revival and Europe’s Transition to Democracy’’ in Austen Ivereigh, The Politics of Religion in an Age of Revival: Studies in Nineteenth-Century Europe and Latin America (London: ILAS, 2000), pp. 22–42, p. 27. 3 Owen Chadwick, A History of the Popes, 1830–1914 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 132–273. 4 Ruth Harris, Lourdes: Body and Spirit in the Secular Age (London: Penguin, 2nd edition, 2000). 5 Harris, Lourdes, pp. 15–16. 6 David Blackbourn, Marpingen: Apparitions of the Virgin Mary in NineteenthCentury is Bismarckian Germany (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995).
0160-9327/$ – see front matter ß 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.endeavour.2010.04.003
56
Feature
Endeavour Vol.34 No.2
Figure 1. The sanctuary at Lourdes.
dove, and an Easter Lamb’’ and the Eucharist as ‘‘the God one eats’’.7 Emile Zola, in his novel, Lourdes, condemned the shrine as a ‘‘miracle show’’, its displays of Catholic penitence as nothing more than the ‘‘death rattle of the clerical party’’.8 However, with the election of Leo XIII to the papacy in 1878, things changed (Figure 2). The church abandoned its highly defensive stance and actively sought to regain its authority by engaging with the political, social, cultural problems raised by modernity. Amid the ridicule from secular liberals, the new pontiff issued Aeterni Patris in 1879. In this encyclical, he dismissed the dichotomy between religion and science established over the past century and reasserted a Thomist synthesis of ‘‘faith’’ and ‘‘reason.’’ He argued that since Thomas Aquinas had penned his thirteenth-century rational defense of faith, the branches of science had fragmented into countless specialties and thus ‘‘loosened the ties which had hitherto bound them so closely to philosophy.’’9 By embracing neoThomism, Leo XIII attempted to re-establish those ties, and claimed that both Church and secular scientists would benefit. On the one hand, the church would not ‘‘gladly welcome’’ ‘‘every useful discovery’’. On the other hand, faith would help in explaining those events for which ‘‘the investigation of facts and the contemplation of nature. . .was not alone sufficient.’’10 The Catholic church’s sudden embrace of scientific methodologies operated in two ways. First, it acted externally – to protect the church from liberal derision. Catholic schools and seminaries started to teach the natural sciences to lay devotees and prospective priests. A handful of Catholic intellectuals like the English Jesuit, Herbert Thurston, roamed the globe, challenging outlandish devotions, offering scientific explanations for the more mundane, and establishing organizations like the Catholic Truth Society.11 Second, it also acted internally – to dam 7 Wolfram Kaiser, ‘‘Clericalism – that is our enemy!: European anticlericalism and the culture wars’’ in Christopher Clark and Wolfram Kaiser (eds.), Culture Wars, Secular-Catholic Conflict in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 47–76, p. 60. 8 Harris, Lourdes, pp. 332–3. 9 M. De Wulf, Scholasticism Old and New: An Introduction to Scholastic Philosophy Medieval and Modern (translated by P. Coffey) (Dublin: M.H. Gill, 1907), p. 201. 10 Jacques Maritain, St. Thomas Aquinas (Cleveland: World Publishing Company, 1958), pp. 207. 11 Michael P. Carroll, Madonnas that maim: Popular Catholicism in Italy since the Fifteenth Century (Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 1992), p. 117.
www.sciencedirect.com
Figure 2. Pope Leo XIII.
the flood of putative miracles and regain control of popular religious devotions. The ecclesiastical authorities now employed scientists and physicians, rather than accusations of paganism and forgery, to downplay more extreme lay cults and reign in the escalating number of those claiming divine help. For example, the church founded the Bureau des Constatations me´dicales in 1883 to examine the continuing claims of miraculous healings at Lourdes. Within a year they had winnowed out so many fakers and frauds that recorded cures were down by nearly half. While the medical doctors employed by the bureau remained amenable to ideas of divine intervention, their presence served ostensibly to eliminate the claims of those experiencing a ‘‘placebo effect,’’ or who had never been ill in the first place.12 In much of Europe this move towards the scientific defense of the miraculous worked. Liberal ridicule decreased and the church often managed to direct lay belief in the miraculous towards the church’s specific political aims. The miraculous apparitions of the Virgin Mary at Ezkioga, Spain, recounted in such detail by William Christian Jr., acted to harden lay resolve against Spain’s impious socialists and liberals.13 However, over the Atlantic in Mexico the Vatican’s desires were less easily implemented. The initial embrace of scientific methodologies buttressed the church against liberal accusations and local 12
Harris, Lourdes, pp. 326, 330. William Christian Jr., Visionaries: The Spanish Republic and the Reign of Christ (Berkeley: University of California, 1996). 13
Feature
Endeavour
Vol.34 No.2
57
heterodoxies. But, with the outbreak of the Mexican Revolution in 1910, circumstances altered. The relationship between the church and an increasingly bolshie laity shifted and the boundaries between authorized and unauthorized devotions became blurred. In many regions an increasingly desperate church sought to use the new scientific methodologies to defend previously unauthorized popular devotions. Culture wars in Mexico During the nineteenth century liberals and conservatives in Mexico engaged in a similar culture war to the rest of the Catholic world. After Independence in 1821 ultramontane Catholics and an unwieldy alliance of anticlerical liberals and modernizing Catholics fought an increasingly polarized struggle over papal power, the relative benefits of secular education, clerical privileges, and church lands. After the loss of half Mexico’s territory to the United States in the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo in 1848, divisions between the two groups ossified. While liberals viewed the church and its concentration of land, power, and popular enthusiasm, as the principal obstruction to the progress of the nation state, conservatives lauded Catholicism as the one overarching ideology capable of uniting Mexicans and preventing the descent into caste war. Between 1858 and 1861 and again between 1862 and 1867 liberals and conservatives fought bloody civil conflicts to assert dominance over the country.14 When the liberals emerged victorious in 1867 they softened many of their shriller anticlerical decrees, instituted during the previous decade, and gradually came to a modus vivendi with the Catholic Church. During the dictatorship of Porfirio Dı´az (1876– 1880 and 1884–1911), this mutual understanding reached its full expression. Under the conciliatory archbishop, Pelagio Antonio de Labastida, the church agreed to avoid any involvement in politics. In return Dı´az controlled the most extreme examples of anticlericalism through a mixture of co-option and coercion. However, attacks on the church, and especially the use of public spaces for church rituals, continued. A handful of Jacobin journalists repeatedly hounded the church over infractions of laws concerning bell-ringing, Easter week processions, and politicized sermons.15 In response to liberal accusations, the church organized countless lay associations, celebrated certain authorized devotions, expanded the number of Catholic schools, and established a Catholic press. Furthermore, during this muted exchange, the Mexican church, like its European counterparts, started to use scientific methodologies to counteract liberal attacks. During the late 1890s Catholic educational establishments in Mexico rejected their onceexclusive emphasis on theology, philosophy and the arts and started to teach courses on the natural sciences. In 1899 the Catholic College of Puebla established an academy of physics with three professors. Within a decade the Palafox seminary in Puebla taught prospective priests 14 The best short introduction to the period is Erika Pani (ed.), Interpretaciones del periodo de Reforma y Segundo Imperio (Mexico, D.F.: Editorial Patria, 2007). 15 Karl Schmitt, Evolution of Mexican Thought on Church-State Relations, 1876– 1911, Unpubl. PhD, University of Pennsylvania, 1954; Robert D Conger, Porfirio Diaz and the Church Hierarchy, 1876–1911 Unpubl. PhD, University of Nebraska, 1955.
www.sciencedirect.com
Figure 3. Virgin of Guadalupe.
courses on physics, chemistry and psychology.16 By 1920 even smaller Catholic establishments, like the seminaries of Tulancingo and Huajuapan, taught the same.17 As in Europe, these scientifically savvy graduates and their allies in the medical establishment (many of whom were initially trained in Catholic colleges) started to seek scientific proofs to support stories of divine intervention. They concentrated on constructing a defense of the Virgin of Guadalupe (Figure 3). This image of the Virgin Mary, allegedly imprinted on the cloak of an indigenous convert barely a decade after the Spanish conquest, had long been the country’s key religious icon, but during the late nineteenth century the devotion received new impetus. In 1895, the archbishops and bishops of Mexico, accompanied by prelates from Canada, the United States and the Caribbean entered the shrine at Tepeyac to crown the image. The occasion, which received full papal blessing was described by one Catholic journalist as ‘‘the most important and transcendental event in the history of our country’’, an acknowledgement of Mexico’s central place in God’s providential plan.18 Yet controversy over the miraculous properties of the image continued. For example, in 1896 Demetrio Mejı´a, a 16
El Pais, 7 June 1899, p. 3. Archivo de la diocesı´s de Huajuapam de Leo´n, Circular 63, 4 February 1922. 18 David Brading, Mexican Phoenix: Our Lady of Guadalupe: Image and Tradition across Five Centuries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 288. 17
Feature
58
Endeavour Vol.34 No.2
leading expert on mental illness at the Mexico City School of Medicine, published an article on the paralysis of a young woman named Maria N. de M. During his course of medicines, the devoted and desperate patient went to pray for a cure at the shrine to the Virgin of Guadalupe. Although her slight recovery was reported in the newspapers as another example of the virgin’s favor, he argued that it was better explained by the course of cannabis he had been proscribing.19 In response, priests, Catholic doctors, and journalists rushed to the image’s defense, arguing that medical and scientific investigations actually proved the icon’s miraculous powers. The first three issues of the Catholic newspaper, El Pais, debated the cure of a young boy’s cataracts while genuflecting before the virgin. Dr. Nicolas Serra argued that the cure was ‘‘so sudden’’ and ‘‘without the actual employment of medicine’’ that it could not be proven by conventional medical science and thus not be discounted as a miracle.20 Outside the pages of Catholic journals, priests also started to employ alleged scientific proofs to convince the faithful of the virgin’s power. In the Bishop of Colima’s sermon in the sanctuary on 12 June 1899, he argued that the cures enacted by the Virgin ‘‘had been examined by many doctors’’ and ‘‘were not provable except by divine grace’’.21 During a celebration of the image at the Basilica on 12 February 1906 one of the resident priests not only quoted ‘‘one of Mexico’s greatest painters’’ who asserted that the image could not have been done by human hands but also three ‘‘eminent doctors’’ from Mexico City who argued that the ‘‘miraculous cure’’ of a man from Puebla could ‘‘not be explained by science’’.22 At the same time, the Mexican ecclesiastical establishment not only used scientific methodologies to rebut liberal accusations but also to control popular devotions. Since the seventeenth century, when initial enthusiasm for conversion had cooled, the Mexican church had viewed many of the country’s more outre´ rural devotions as poorly concealed revivals of pre-Hispanic beliefs. From the late 1800 s onwards, prelates and priests in Mexico’s more indigenous dioceses accompanied their accusations of theological inconsistency and pagan continuity with scientific investigation. For example, in 1919 an Italian doctor, Jose´ di Gabrielli, persuaded a group of Chontal Indians that he was the new Messiah and that they should crucify him during Easter Week. Although the crucifixion was unsuccessful, the local priest dampened popular enthusiasm by ordering a full examination by a local doctor who declared to the assembled Chontals that Di Gabrielli was suffering from ‘‘mental illness’’ and that his ravings were the product of ‘‘severe malfunctions of the brain’’. He proposed that the miraculous healings he had performed were ‘‘simple medical cures, easily available to anyone with a small amount of medical training’’ and suggested that the Italian had shown little pain during the crucifixion because he had ‘‘probably anaesthetized his hands’’.23 He even sent an explanation of the case off to a fellow priest in the United States, who then passed it on to a medical acquaintance. 19 20 21 22 23
Gaceta me´dica de Me´xico, vol. 33 (1896), p. 481. El Pais, 1 January 1899; El Pais, 2 January 1899; El Pais, 3 January 1899. El Pais, 13 June 1899. El Pais, 13 February 1906. Archivo Particular de Raul Urquidi, Actas judiciales.
www.sciencedirect.com
Figure 4. Mexican Revolutionaries.
The doctor published his findings in the 1920 issue of The Urologic and Cutaneous Review to support Havelock Ellis’ claims that self-inflicted pain was caused by sexual excitement.24 Di Gabrielli’s Messianic assertions were so potentially disruptive that the Catholic church had little choice but to call on its scientific allies and construct a cohesive case against his claims. However, during the Mexican Revolution (1910–1920), the church was not always so dogmatic in its rejection of lay cults. In fact, as the hierarchy’s embrace of the miraculous powers of the Virgin of Tzocuilac indicates, the institution was not only increasingly open to new devotions, but also employed new scientific methodologies in their defense. Religious revival in the Mexican Revolution The Mexican Revolution was a popular agrarian revolution which attempted to redistribute recently privatized communal lands among the country’s peasants (Figure 4). However, for many peasants the decade was one of violence, sickness and scarcity rather than liberation or gain. As Luis Gonza´lez y Gonza´lez affirmed, outside the regions of recent privatization and consequent class tensions, Mexicans experienced the period as one of ‘‘savage crimes, kidnappings, hung bodies, raped women and stolen religious images’’. Many peasants were not so much passive or non-revolutionary as very actively ‘‘revolutionized’’.25 Such a radical disruption of everyday life also caused an upheaval of religious beliefs. Increasingly desperate Mexicans sought respite and security in both old and new religious images. As Matthew Butler argues, the revolution was ‘‘a period of genuine religious ferment as well as social upheaval’’. Furthermore ‘‘religion and Revolution were linked in a dialectic in which the radicalization of [and one might add, the violence enacted on] society were accompanied by innovative, often improvised responses to the religious sphere’’.26 Revolutionary Mexico abounded with tales of
24
The Urologic and Cutaneous Review, vol. 20 (1920), p. 421. ‘Luis Gonza´lez y Gonza´lez, ‘‘La Revolucio´n Mexicana desde el punto de vista de los revolucionados’’’, Historias, 8–9 (1985), pp. 5–14; Ronald Waterbury, ‘‘Non-revolutionary Peasants: Oaxaca compared to Morelos in the Mexican Revolution’’, in Comparative Studies in Society and History 17 (October 1975), pp. 410–42. 26 Matthew Butler, ‘‘Introduction, A Revolution in Spirit? Mexico 1910–1940’’ in Matthew Butler, Faith and Impiety in Revolutionary Mexico (London: Palgrave, 2006), pp. 1–20. 25
Feature
Endeavour
Vol.34 No.2
Messiahs, modern Moseses, and even miraculous mushrooms. Religious effervescence and the fear of social disintegration forced the church into a difficult balancing act. On the one hand, ecclesiastical authorities attempted to suffocate the more outlandish or crypto-pagan cults. On the other hand, they also tried to draw potentially rebellious peasants closer to the church by co-opting previously informal devotions. In 1911 the archbishopric of Puebla was in particularly dire straits. Agrarian rebels under Emiliano Zapata stalked the region’s haciendas, threatening to redistribute lands to the peasants.27 At the same time banditry and insurgent raids on the region’s railways and roads made traditional shrines like the Virgin of Guadalupe’s sanctuary to the north at Tepeyac off limits. In such a context, the local ecclesiastical authorities sent one of their new scientifically minded priests, Francisco Herna´ndez, to the shrine of the Virgin of Tzocuilac to discover whether the image was worthy of formal support. He returned two years later with a huge report listing the painting’s extraordinary qualities and with the firm affirmation of a board of doctors that the Virgin was truly miraculous. The centerpiece of the report was a compilation of over one hundred individual claims of miraculous intervention. The Sanctuary of Tzocuilac attracted both villagers as well as pilgrims from the surrounding environs, and many left ex-votos at the Virgin’s shrine. These ex-votos – typically descriptions of miraculous rescue penned or painted in honor of a patron saint, attesting to the particular beneficence received by the author – ranged from the early eighteenth century to 1911, but the priest in charge of the sanctuary annotated only those of the faithful still alive and able to provide corroboration if necessary. The dangers varied. As might be expected during the Revolution, many people thanked the Virgin for her help saving them or their relatives from execution by roving bands of revolutionaries. Still others thanked the Virgin for rescue from more mundane dangers, such as the priest who tripped over an embankment surrounding a well. He was saved from a deadly drop to the bottom only by his vestment, which, catching the edge, left him dangling over the abyss. Over a third of the claims, however, dealt with a physical ailment of some sort. Listing the cures one by one, Herna´ndez put the most probable at the forefront, stressing cases where the devotees had sought but failed to achieve a medical remedy. The first cure concerned a local priest who was suffering from a stomach condition. This had ‘‘confounded not only local doctors but also specialists from Mexico City’’. But, the Virgin had restored his health, thanks to the pious acts performed by another local priest and a few people who held the presbyter in high esteem. Another beneficiary, a ‘‘noted violinist and professor at the National Music Conservatory of Mexico City’’ had contracted a ‘‘fatal’’ case of typhoid. After visiting countless specialists he had declared that ‘‘science was impotent to combat the evil’’ and put his fate in the hands of the Virgin. Herna´ndez also 27 David LaFrance, The Mexican Revolution in Puebla, 1908–1913: The Maderista Movement and the Failure of Liberal Reform (Wilmington, Del.: Scholarly Resources, 1989).
www.sciencedirect.com
59
stressed cases where the medical fraternity and the church worked in seeming tandem. In one ex-voto a pregnant woman had fallen ill. Numerous physicians had looked at her case and opined that she and her fetus would probably die. A faithful professor of obstetrics, however, commended the sick woman to the Virgin. The result was mixed: the patient lost the child, but did recover herself. Herna´ndez’s case not only involved medical proof of miraculous cures but also scientific proof of the miraculous origin of the image itself. According to interviews with the prominent families of the village, the painted image first appeared in the early seventeenth century, on the adobe wall of the house of a cacique, or local, indigenous leader. Believing it to be the result of diabolical trickery, the local priest ordered it erased. When he returned to the village the next week, however, the image had apparently reappeared. Twice more this cycle was repeated, with the priest finally erasing the image himself, only to find it restored the next Sunday. A sanctuary was soon built to honor the painting, now obviously of divine origin. According to the interviewees, however, the fervor of the local populace eventually faded and the Virgin was neglected. The house of the cacique subsequently collapsed, exposing the painting to the elements for decades. It was only in the mideighteenth century that the Virgin’s aid was again sought, when another epidemic struck the region, and her popularity grew from that time. While Herna´ndez could not scientifically verify the triple erasure and reappearance – the interviewees were taken at their word – he could ascertain the quality of the painting. He assembled a panel of physicians, similar to that established at Lourdes only on a smaller, ad hoc scale. The chief consultant was Dr. Casillas, the chair of internal pathology, physiology, and legal medicine at the Catholic University of Puebla. He certified that, despite being exposed to the elements and their concomitant ‘‘deleterious substances composed of sulfurous, ammoniac, and other chemicals that could have altered the color, shape, evenness of the surface, etc.,’’ the painting had not suffered ‘‘the slightest deterioration.’’ The remaining physicians on the panel reached similar conclusions, adding ‘‘corrosive saltpeter’’ to the list of deleterious substances. Such resilience could only be yet another sign of the Virgin’s divine origin. At the end of the document Herna´ndez verified that he thought the picture ‘‘truly divine’’ its miracles ‘‘proven’’.28 Although the Virgin of Tzocuilac had languished for nearly three hundred years with no authorized church support, contained suspiciously pagan elements, and indigenous origins, the archbishopric of Puebla accepted Herna´ndez’s evidence and promoted Tzocuilac as one of Mexico’s expanding number of Marian shrines. The Revolution had made such negotiations necessary. Furthermore, as revolutionary leaders embraced a revived anticlericalism during the 1920s, such compro28 Archivo de la Catedral de Puebla, Datos histo´ricos referentes a la milagrosa aparicio´n de Nuestra Sen˜ora de Tzocuilac. The archdiocese of Puebla is notoriously secretive and its rich diocesan archives still remain closed to all but a few priests. Although the Cathedral archive is open, it mainly contains fairly thin material on the construction and benefices of the cathedral itself. This folder on the miracles at Tzocuilac was buried underneath these documents and must have been left their in error.
60
Feature
Endeavour Vol.34 No.2
mises became even more common place. In Puebla, the church examined and verified the miraculous appearance of an engraving of the Virgin of Guadalupe in a cave outside the village of Jonotla in 1923.29 A few years later a local priest allowed an image of crucified Christ on a hallucinogenic mushroom pride of place in the local church of Chignahuapa´n, Puebla.30 The church’s
embrace of science, which had been cautious at best, again receded as political pressures forced the institution to accept more extreme manifestations of the miraculous. Only in the 1940s, as the church and state came to an uneasy alliance, were ecclesiastical authorities able to use scientific methodologies to crush popular devotions once again.31
29 Justino Corte´s Castellanos, Justo Garcı´a, Un sendero de luz y alegrı´a (Puebla: L’Anxaneta, 2008), pp. 155–64. 30 G. Guzma´n, R.G. Wasson, T. Herrera, ‘‘Una iglesia dedicada al culto de un hongo, ‘‘Nuestro Sen˜or del Honguito’’, en Chignahuapan, Puebla’’ Boletı´n de la Sociedad Mexicana de Micologı´a 9 (1975), pp. 137–147.
31 Alicia Barabas, Utopias indias: Movimientos Sociorreligiosos en Me´xico (Mexico, D.F.: Grijalvo, 1989).
www.sciencedirect.com
Endeavour
Vol.34 No.2
The limits of Catholic science and the Mexican Revolution Aaron Van Oosterhout and Benjamin T. Smith* Department of History, Michigan State University, United States
This article examines the church’s embrace of scientific methodologies in the late nineteenth century. It is argued that in general, the shift worked to repel liberal ridicule and control popular devotions. However, in Mexico the effects were mixed. During the Mexican Revolution, a desperate church was forced to apply these new scientific methodologies to increasingly unauthorized cults. On 20 April 1911, a priest, Francisco Herna´ndez, arrived in Tzocuilac, a barrio of Cholula, just southwest of the Mexican city of Puebla, to verify a miraculous painting of the Virgin Mary. Ultimately, Herna´ndez would learn the long history of the Virgin of Tzocuilac, encompassing three hundred years of salvations from droughts, war, and epidemics. But, rather than accepting the miracles as examples of divine intervention or dismissing them as the simple imaginings of semi-pagan peasants, Herna´ndez brought to bear a rigorous investigative methodology which included interviews with devotees, statements of medical conditions, and affidavits from medical doctors. The inquiry would last two years. Despite Herna´ndez’s self-conscious employment of modern scientific methodologies, in the end all doubts were quashed and he reported to his superiors that the image truly possessed miraculous powers. Why did the Catholic church, usually so impervious to accusations of traditionalism, seek to employ modern science to prove something so rooted in faith as miraculous cures? Furthermore, having gone to so much effort, why did they still accept the miracles as valid? During the nineteenth century, Catholic countries throughout Europe and Latin America experienced a series of what Christopher Clark and Wolfram Kaiser have dubbed ‘‘culture wars’’, which pitted Enlightenment ideas against the increasingly dogmatic assertions of the Catholic church.1 The most vociferous and occasionally violent debates concerned issues of church-state governance, such as clerical privilege, church wealth, and education. However, this escalating war of words also set in opposition rational scientific methodologies and the more extreme examples of faith-based epistemology. With the election of the Italian Pontiff, Pius IX (1846–1878), the rivals reached a high point of polarization. Under pressure by liberal forces in Italy and throughout Europe, Pius IX engaged in what Margaret Lavinia Anderson calls ‘‘an experimental ‘‘let’s-try-it-on-for-size’’ willingness to defend *Corresponding author.Smith, B.T. ([email protected]) Christopher Clark and Wolfram Kaiser (eds.), Culture Wars, Secular-Catholic Conflict in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 1
www.sciencedirect.com
the indefensible’’.2 His ultramontane followers not only refused any dialogue with suspected liberal states, they also exalted in the church’s celebration of the supposedly miraculous. For example in 1854 Pius IX published Ineffabilis Deus, which raised the Immaculate Conception from a shared Catholic belief to a dogma of the Catholic church. A decade later he published the encyclical, Syllabus Errorum, which reached a reactionary zenith in its last article which condemned all those who stated that the Pope ‘‘could or ought to reconcile himself, and come to terms with, progress, liberalism and modern civilization’’. As if to prove the point, six years later at the First Vatican Council Pius IX passed the dogma of papal infallibility, which declared the pope was free from error when deciding on issues of the Catholic church.3 Beyond the Vatican, in the rural villages and parish chapels which formed the Catholic Church’s heartland, priests and parishioners also reacted to liberal derision by emphasizing progressively more extraordinary popular devotions. Most famously in 1858 a 14-year-old girl, Bernadette Soubirous, claimed that the Virgin Mary appeared to her in a grotto near the small French town of Lourdes on seventeen occasions (Figure 1). Two years later the local bishop verified the apparitions and by the late nineteenth century thousands of pilgrims were arriving at the sanctuary by train to seek its miraculous cures.4 Over the next half-century the church embraced countless other Marian apparitions, encouraging a veritable thaumaturgical tsunami throughout conflictive areas of Europe. For example in 1870 children in the French town of Pontmain ‘‘saw’’ an apparition of the Virgin in the sky, which enjoined them to prayer, and in, return, saved the town from Prussian bombardment.5 In 1876, at the height of the Prussian Kulturkampf, three girls experienced visions of the Virgin in the small town of Marpingen.6 As elite and popular Catholics locked into a spiral of escalating mysticism, liberals looked on with contempt, mocking the institution’s dogmatic adherence to the improbable and the impossible. In France, radical journalists derided the infallible Pope as the ‘‘Vice-God’’, the Trinity as ‘‘the owner of the universe, a
2 Margaret Lavinia Anderson ‘‘The Divisions of the Pope: The Catholic Revival and Europe’s Transition to Democracy’’ in Austen Ivereigh, The Politics of Religion in an Age of Revival: Studies in Nineteenth-Century Europe and Latin America (London: ILAS, 2000), pp. 22–42, p. 27. 3 Owen Chadwick, A History of the Popes, 1830–1914 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 132–273. 4 Ruth Harris, Lourdes: Body and Spirit in the Secular Age (London: Penguin, 2nd edition, 2000). 5 Harris, Lourdes, pp. 15–16. 6 David Blackbourn, Marpingen: Apparitions of the Virgin Mary in NineteenthCentury is Bismarckian Germany (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995).
0160-9327/$ – see front matter ß 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.endeavour.2010.04.003
56
Feature
Endeavour Vol.34 No.2
Figure 1. The sanctuary at Lourdes.
dove, and an Easter Lamb’’ and the Eucharist as ‘‘the God one eats’’.7 Emile Zola, in his novel, Lourdes, condemned the shrine as a ‘‘miracle show’’, its displays of Catholic penitence as nothing more than the ‘‘death rattle of the clerical party’’.8 However, with the election of Leo XIII to the papacy in 1878, things changed (Figure 2). The church abandoned its highly defensive stance and actively sought to regain its authority by engaging with the political, social, cultural problems raised by modernity. Amid the ridicule from secular liberals, the new pontiff issued Aeterni Patris in 1879. In this encyclical, he dismissed the dichotomy between religion and science established over the past century and reasserted a Thomist synthesis of ‘‘faith’’ and ‘‘reason.’’ He argued that since Thomas Aquinas had penned his thirteenth-century rational defense of faith, the branches of science had fragmented into countless specialties and thus ‘‘loosened the ties which had hitherto bound them so closely to philosophy.’’9 By embracing neoThomism, Leo XIII attempted to re-establish those ties, and claimed that both Church and secular scientists would benefit. On the one hand, the church would not ‘‘gladly welcome’’ ‘‘every useful discovery’’. On the other hand, faith would help in explaining those events for which ‘‘the investigation of facts and the contemplation of nature. . .was not alone sufficient.’’10 The Catholic church’s sudden embrace of scientific methodologies operated in two ways. First, it acted externally – to protect the church from liberal derision. Catholic schools and seminaries started to teach the natural sciences to lay devotees and prospective priests. A handful of Catholic intellectuals like the English Jesuit, Herbert Thurston, roamed the globe, challenging outlandish devotions, offering scientific explanations for the more mundane, and establishing organizations like the Catholic Truth Society.11 Second, it also acted internally – to dam 7 Wolfram Kaiser, ‘‘Clericalism – that is our enemy!: European anticlericalism and the culture wars’’ in Christopher Clark and Wolfram Kaiser (eds.), Culture Wars, Secular-Catholic Conflict in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 47–76, p. 60. 8 Harris, Lourdes, pp. 332–3. 9 M. De Wulf, Scholasticism Old and New: An Introduction to Scholastic Philosophy Medieval and Modern (translated by P. Coffey) (Dublin: M.H. Gill, 1907), p. 201. 10 Jacques Maritain, St. Thomas Aquinas (Cleveland: World Publishing Company, 1958), pp. 207. 11 Michael P. Carroll, Madonnas that maim: Popular Catholicism in Italy since the Fifteenth Century (Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 1992), p. 117.
www.sciencedirect.com
Figure 2. Pope Leo XIII.
the flood of putative miracles and regain control of popular religious devotions. The ecclesiastical authorities now employed scientists and physicians, rather than accusations of paganism and forgery, to downplay more extreme lay cults and reign in the escalating number of those claiming divine help. For example, the church founded the Bureau des Constatations me´dicales in 1883 to examine the continuing claims of miraculous healings at Lourdes. Within a year they had winnowed out so many fakers and frauds that recorded cures were down by nearly half. While the medical doctors employed by the bureau remained amenable to ideas of divine intervention, their presence served ostensibly to eliminate the claims of those experiencing a ‘‘placebo effect,’’ or who had never been ill in the first place.12 In much of Europe this move towards the scientific defense of the miraculous worked. Liberal ridicule decreased and the church often managed to direct lay belief in the miraculous towards the church’s specific political aims. The miraculous apparitions of the Virgin Mary at Ezkioga, Spain, recounted in such detail by William Christian Jr., acted to harden lay resolve against Spain’s impious socialists and liberals.13 However, over the Atlantic in Mexico the Vatican’s desires were less easily implemented. The initial embrace of scientific methodologies buttressed the church against liberal accusations and local 12
Harris, Lourdes, pp. 326, 330. William Christian Jr., Visionaries: The Spanish Republic and the Reign of Christ (Berkeley: University of California, 1996). 13
Feature
Endeavour
Vol.34 No.2
57
heterodoxies. But, with the outbreak of the Mexican Revolution in 1910, circumstances altered. The relationship between the church and an increasingly bolshie laity shifted and the boundaries between authorized and unauthorized devotions became blurred. In many regions an increasingly desperate church sought to use the new scientific methodologies to defend previously unauthorized popular devotions. Culture wars in Mexico During the nineteenth century liberals and conservatives in Mexico engaged in a similar culture war to the rest of the Catholic world. After Independence in 1821 ultramontane Catholics and an unwieldy alliance of anticlerical liberals and modernizing Catholics fought an increasingly polarized struggle over papal power, the relative benefits of secular education, clerical privileges, and church lands. After the loss of half Mexico’s territory to the United States in the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo in 1848, divisions between the two groups ossified. While liberals viewed the church and its concentration of land, power, and popular enthusiasm, as the principal obstruction to the progress of the nation state, conservatives lauded Catholicism as the one overarching ideology capable of uniting Mexicans and preventing the descent into caste war. Between 1858 and 1861 and again between 1862 and 1867 liberals and conservatives fought bloody civil conflicts to assert dominance over the country.14 When the liberals emerged victorious in 1867 they softened many of their shriller anticlerical decrees, instituted during the previous decade, and gradually came to a modus vivendi with the Catholic Church. During the dictatorship of Porfirio Dı´az (1876– 1880 and 1884–1911), this mutual understanding reached its full expression. Under the conciliatory archbishop, Pelagio Antonio de Labastida, the church agreed to avoid any involvement in politics. In return Dı´az controlled the most extreme examples of anticlericalism through a mixture of co-option and coercion. However, attacks on the church, and especially the use of public spaces for church rituals, continued. A handful of Jacobin journalists repeatedly hounded the church over infractions of laws concerning bell-ringing, Easter week processions, and politicized sermons.15 In response to liberal accusations, the church organized countless lay associations, celebrated certain authorized devotions, expanded the number of Catholic schools, and established a Catholic press. Furthermore, during this muted exchange, the Mexican church, like its European counterparts, started to use scientific methodologies to counteract liberal attacks. During the late 1890s Catholic educational establishments in Mexico rejected their onceexclusive emphasis on theology, philosophy and the arts and started to teach courses on the natural sciences. In 1899 the Catholic College of Puebla established an academy of physics with three professors. Within a decade the Palafox seminary in Puebla taught prospective priests 14 The best short introduction to the period is Erika Pani (ed.), Interpretaciones del periodo de Reforma y Segundo Imperio (Mexico, D.F.: Editorial Patria, 2007). 15 Karl Schmitt, Evolution of Mexican Thought on Church-State Relations, 1876– 1911, Unpubl. PhD, University of Pennsylvania, 1954; Robert D Conger, Porfirio Diaz and the Church Hierarchy, 1876–1911 Unpubl. PhD, University of Nebraska, 1955.
www.sciencedirect.com
Figure 3. Virgin of Guadalupe.
courses on physics, chemistry and psychology.16 By 1920 even smaller Catholic establishments, like the seminaries of Tulancingo and Huajuapan, taught the same.17 As in Europe, these scientifically savvy graduates and their allies in the medical establishment (many of whom were initially trained in Catholic colleges) started to seek scientific proofs to support stories of divine intervention. They concentrated on constructing a defense of the Virgin of Guadalupe (Figure 3). This image of the Virgin Mary, allegedly imprinted on the cloak of an indigenous convert barely a decade after the Spanish conquest, had long been the country’s key religious icon, but during the late nineteenth century the devotion received new impetus. In 1895, the archbishops and bishops of Mexico, accompanied by prelates from Canada, the United States and the Caribbean entered the shrine at Tepeyac to crown the image. The occasion, which received full papal blessing was described by one Catholic journalist as ‘‘the most important and transcendental event in the history of our country’’, an acknowledgement of Mexico’s central place in God’s providential plan.18 Yet controversy over the miraculous properties of the image continued. For example, in 1896 Demetrio Mejı´a, a 16
El Pais, 7 June 1899, p. 3. Archivo de la diocesı´s de Huajuapam de Leo´n, Circular 63, 4 February 1922. 18 David Brading, Mexican Phoenix: Our Lady of Guadalupe: Image and Tradition across Five Centuries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 288. 17
Feature
58
Endeavour Vol.34 No.2
leading expert on mental illness at the Mexico City School of Medicine, published an article on the paralysis of a young woman named Maria N. de M. During his course of medicines, the devoted and desperate patient went to pray for a cure at the shrine to the Virgin of Guadalupe. Although her slight recovery was reported in the newspapers as another example of the virgin’s favor, he argued that it was better explained by the course of cannabis he had been proscribing.19 In response, priests, Catholic doctors, and journalists rushed to the image’s defense, arguing that medical and scientific investigations actually proved the icon’s miraculous powers. The first three issues of the Catholic newspaper, El Pais, debated the cure of a young boy’s cataracts while genuflecting before the virgin. Dr. Nicolas Serra argued that the cure was ‘‘so sudden’’ and ‘‘without the actual employment of medicine’’ that it could not be proven by conventional medical science and thus not be discounted as a miracle.20 Outside the pages of Catholic journals, priests also started to employ alleged scientific proofs to convince the faithful of the virgin’s power. In the Bishop of Colima’s sermon in the sanctuary on 12 June 1899, he argued that the cures enacted by the Virgin ‘‘had been examined by many doctors’’ and ‘‘were not provable except by divine grace’’.21 During a celebration of the image at the Basilica on 12 February 1906 one of the resident priests not only quoted ‘‘one of Mexico’s greatest painters’’ who asserted that the image could not have been done by human hands but also three ‘‘eminent doctors’’ from Mexico City who argued that the ‘‘miraculous cure’’ of a man from Puebla could ‘‘not be explained by science’’.22 At the same time, the Mexican ecclesiastical establishment not only used scientific methodologies to rebut liberal accusations but also to control popular devotions. Since the seventeenth century, when initial enthusiasm for conversion had cooled, the Mexican church had viewed many of the country’s more outre´ rural devotions as poorly concealed revivals of pre-Hispanic beliefs. From the late 1800 s onwards, prelates and priests in Mexico’s more indigenous dioceses accompanied their accusations of theological inconsistency and pagan continuity with scientific investigation. For example, in 1919 an Italian doctor, Jose´ di Gabrielli, persuaded a group of Chontal Indians that he was the new Messiah and that they should crucify him during Easter Week. Although the crucifixion was unsuccessful, the local priest dampened popular enthusiasm by ordering a full examination by a local doctor who declared to the assembled Chontals that Di Gabrielli was suffering from ‘‘mental illness’’ and that his ravings were the product of ‘‘severe malfunctions of the brain’’. He proposed that the miraculous healings he had performed were ‘‘simple medical cures, easily available to anyone with a small amount of medical training’’ and suggested that the Italian had shown little pain during the crucifixion because he had ‘‘probably anaesthetized his hands’’.23 He even sent an explanation of the case off to a fellow priest in the United States, who then passed it on to a medical acquaintance. 19 20 21 22 23
Gaceta me´dica de Me´xico, vol. 33 (1896), p. 481. El Pais, 1 January 1899; El Pais, 2 January 1899; El Pais, 3 January 1899. El Pais, 13 June 1899. El Pais, 13 February 1906. Archivo Particular de Raul Urquidi, Actas judiciales.
www.sciencedirect.com
Figure 4. Mexican Revolutionaries.
The doctor published his findings in the 1920 issue of The Urologic and Cutaneous Review to support Havelock Ellis’ claims that self-inflicted pain was caused by sexual excitement.24 Di Gabrielli’s Messianic assertions were so potentially disruptive that the Catholic church had little choice but to call on its scientific allies and construct a cohesive case against his claims. However, during the Mexican Revolution (1910–1920), the church was not always so dogmatic in its rejection of lay cults. In fact, as the hierarchy’s embrace of the miraculous powers of the Virgin of Tzocuilac indicates, the institution was not only increasingly open to new devotions, but also employed new scientific methodologies in their defense. Religious revival in the Mexican Revolution The Mexican Revolution was a popular agrarian revolution which attempted to redistribute recently privatized communal lands among the country’s peasants (Figure 4). However, for many peasants the decade was one of violence, sickness and scarcity rather than liberation or gain. As Luis Gonza´lez y Gonza´lez affirmed, outside the regions of recent privatization and consequent class tensions, Mexicans experienced the period as one of ‘‘savage crimes, kidnappings, hung bodies, raped women and stolen religious images’’. Many peasants were not so much passive or non-revolutionary as very actively ‘‘revolutionized’’.25 Such a radical disruption of everyday life also caused an upheaval of religious beliefs. Increasingly desperate Mexicans sought respite and security in both old and new religious images. As Matthew Butler argues, the revolution was ‘‘a period of genuine religious ferment as well as social upheaval’’. Furthermore ‘‘religion and Revolution were linked in a dialectic in which the radicalization of [and one might add, the violence enacted on] society were accompanied by innovative, often improvised responses to the religious sphere’’.26 Revolutionary Mexico abounded with tales of
24
The Urologic and Cutaneous Review, vol. 20 (1920), p. 421. ‘Luis Gonza´lez y Gonza´lez, ‘‘La Revolucio´n Mexicana desde el punto de vista de los revolucionados’’’, Historias, 8–9 (1985), pp. 5–14; Ronald Waterbury, ‘‘Non-revolutionary Peasants: Oaxaca compared to Morelos in the Mexican Revolution’’, in Comparative Studies in Society and History 17 (October 1975), pp. 410–42. 26 Matthew Butler, ‘‘Introduction, A Revolution in Spirit? Mexico 1910–1940’’ in Matthew Butler, Faith and Impiety in Revolutionary Mexico (London: Palgrave, 2006), pp. 1–20. 25
Feature
Endeavour
Vol.34 No.2
Messiahs, modern Moseses, and even miraculous mushrooms. Religious effervescence and the fear of social disintegration forced the church into a difficult balancing act. On the one hand, ecclesiastical authorities attempted to suffocate the more outlandish or crypto-pagan cults. On the other hand, they also tried to draw potentially rebellious peasants closer to the church by co-opting previously informal devotions. In 1911 the archbishopric of Puebla was in particularly dire straits. Agrarian rebels under Emiliano Zapata stalked the region’s haciendas, threatening to redistribute lands to the peasants.27 At the same time banditry and insurgent raids on the region’s railways and roads made traditional shrines like the Virgin of Guadalupe’s sanctuary to the north at Tepeyac off limits. In such a context, the local ecclesiastical authorities sent one of their new scientifically minded priests, Francisco Herna´ndez, to the shrine of the Virgin of Tzocuilac to discover whether the image was worthy of formal support. He returned two years later with a huge report listing the painting’s extraordinary qualities and with the firm affirmation of a board of doctors that the Virgin was truly miraculous. The centerpiece of the report was a compilation of over one hundred individual claims of miraculous intervention. The Sanctuary of Tzocuilac attracted both villagers as well as pilgrims from the surrounding environs, and many left ex-votos at the Virgin’s shrine. These ex-votos – typically descriptions of miraculous rescue penned or painted in honor of a patron saint, attesting to the particular beneficence received by the author – ranged from the early eighteenth century to 1911, but the priest in charge of the sanctuary annotated only those of the faithful still alive and able to provide corroboration if necessary. The dangers varied. As might be expected during the Revolution, many people thanked the Virgin for her help saving them or their relatives from execution by roving bands of revolutionaries. Still others thanked the Virgin for rescue from more mundane dangers, such as the priest who tripped over an embankment surrounding a well. He was saved from a deadly drop to the bottom only by his vestment, which, catching the edge, left him dangling over the abyss. Over a third of the claims, however, dealt with a physical ailment of some sort. Listing the cures one by one, Herna´ndez put the most probable at the forefront, stressing cases where the devotees had sought but failed to achieve a medical remedy. The first cure concerned a local priest who was suffering from a stomach condition. This had ‘‘confounded not only local doctors but also specialists from Mexico City’’. But, the Virgin had restored his health, thanks to the pious acts performed by another local priest and a few people who held the presbyter in high esteem. Another beneficiary, a ‘‘noted violinist and professor at the National Music Conservatory of Mexico City’’ had contracted a ‘‘fatal’’ case of typhoid. After visiting countless specialists he had declared that ‘‘science was impotent to combat the evil’’ and put his fate in the hands of the Virgin. Herna´ndez also 27 David LaFrance, The Mexican Revolution in Puebla, 1908–1913: The Maderista Movement and the Failure of Liberal Reform (Wilmington, Del.: Scholarly Resources, 1989).
www.sciencedirect.com
59
stressed cases where the medical fraternity and the church worked in seeming tandem. In one ex-voto a pregnant woman had fallen ill. Numerous physicians had looked at her case and opined that she and her fetus would probably die. A faithful professor of obstetrics, however, commended the sick woman to the Virgin. The result was mixed: the patient lost the child, but did recover herself. Herna´ndez’s case not only involved medical proof of miraculous cures but also scientific proof of the miraculous origin of the image itself. According to interviews with the prominent families of the village, the painted image first appeared in the early seventeenth century, on the adobe wall of the house of a cacique, or local, indigenous leader. Believing it to be the result of diabolical trickery, the local priest ordered it erased. When he returned to the village the next week, however, the image had apparently reappeared. Twice more this cycle was repeated, with the priest finally erasing the image himself, only to find it restored the next Sunday. A sanctuary was soon built to honor the painting, now obviously of divine origin. According to the interviewees, however, the fervor of the local populace eventually faded and the Virgin was neglected. The house of the cacique subsequently collapsed, exposing the painting to the elements for decades. It was only in the mideighteenth century that the Virgin’s aid was again sought, when another epidemic struck the region, and her popularity grew from that time. While Herna´ndez could not scientifically verify the triple erasure and reappearance – the interviewees were taken at their word – he could ascertain the quality of the painting. He assembled a panel of physicians, similar to that established at Lourdes only on a smaller, ad hoc scale. The chief consultant was Dr. Casillas, the chair of internal pathology, physiology, and legal medicine at the Catholic University of Puebla. He certified that, despite being exposed to the elements and their concomitant ‘‘deleterious substances composed of sulfurous, ammoniac, and other chemicals that could have altered the color, shape, evenness of the surface, etc.,’’ the painting had not suffered ‘‘the slightest deterioration.’’ The remaining physicians on the panel reached similar conclusions, adding ‘‘corrosive saltpeter’’ to the list of deleterious substances. Such resilience could only be yet another sign of the Virgin’s divine origin. At the end of the document Herna´ndez verified that he thought the picture ‘‘truly divine’’ its miracles ‘‘proven’’.28 Although the Virgin of Tzocuilac had languished for nearly three hundred years with no authorized church support, contained suspiciously pagan elements, and indigenous origins, the archbishopric of Puebla accepted Herna´ndez’s evidence and promoted Tzocuilac as one of Mexico’s expanding number of Marian shrines. The Revolution had made such negotiations necessary. Furthermore, as revolutionary leaders embraced a revived anticlericalism during the 1920s, such compro28 Archivo de la Catedral de Puebla, Datos histo´ricos referentes a la milagrosa aparicio´n de Nuestra Sen˜ora de Tzocuilac. The archdiocese of Puebla is notoriously secretive and its rich diocesan archives still remain closed to all but a few priests. Although the Cathedral archive is open, it mainly contains fairly thin material on the construction and benefices of the cathedral itself. This folder on the miracles at Tzocuilac was buried underneath these documents and must have been left their in error.
60
Feature
Endeavour Vol.34 No.2
mises became even more common place. In Puebla, the church examined and verified the miraculous appearance of an engraving of the Virgin of Guadalupe in a cave outside the village of Jonotla in 1923.29 A few years later a local priest allowed an image of crucified Christ on a hallucinogenic mushroom pride of place in the local church of Chignahuapa´n, Puebla.30 The church’s
embrace of science, which had been cautious at best, again receded as political pressures forced the institution to accept more extreme manifestations of the miraculous. Only in the 1940s, as the church and state came to an uneasy alliance, were ecclesiastical authorities able to use scientific methodologies to crush popular devotions once again.31
29 Justino Corte´s Castellanos, Justo Garcı´a, Un sendero de luz y alegrı´a (Puebla: L’Anxaneta, 2008), pp. 155–64. 30 G. Guzma´n, R.G. Wasson, T. Herrera, ‘‘Una iglesia dedicada al culto de un hongo, ‘‘Nuestro Sen˜or del Honguito’’, en Chignahuapan, Puebla’’ Boletı´n de la Sociedad Mexicana de Micologı´a 9 (1975), pp. 137–147.
31 Alicia Barabas, Utopias indias: Movimientos Sociorreligiosos en Me´xico (Mexico, D.F.: Grijalvo, 1989).
www.sciencedirect.com