NEWS FEATURE: Belief in Virgin sighting endures; doubting abbot in the hot seat

c. 1996 Religion News Service MEXICO CITY (RNS)-So revered is Mexico’s Virgin of Guadalupe that in addition to her status as its patron saint, she is considered the mother of the country. Her colorful image is omnipresent, featured in street paintings, hung above doorways and dangled from rearview mirrors. Her shrine, on a Mexico City […]

c. 1996 Religion News Service

MEXICO CITY (RNS)-So revered is Mexico’s Virgin of Guadalupe that in addition to her status as its patron saint, she is considered the mother of the country. Her colorful image is omnipresent, featured in street paintings, hung above doorways and dangled from rearview mirrors.

Her shrine, on a Mexico City hilltop where an Indian peasant named Juan Diego is said to have seen visions of the Virgin Mary four centuries ago, draws millions of Catholic pilgrims each year, many of them crawling on their knees.


It’s no wonder that Mexico was stunned by an interview reported in an Italian magazine that Guillermo Schulenburg, the shrine’s abbot for the past 33 years, had doubted Juan Diego’s existence.

Schulenburg responded to the reports with a brief statement denying he’d done the interview. It turned out that 30 Giorni magazine hadn’t talked to the abbot, but instead had excerpted an interview he did last year with Ixtus, a Catholic magazine published in Mexico.

In the interview, Schulenburg said he is among those Catholics who, though they believe in the power of the Virgin Mary, question her apparitions.

When asked if Juan Diego existed, he said, “He’s a symbol, not a reality.”

Schulenburg has not denied the Ixtus interview and has declined requests to comment on it.

Others have been more vocal.

“He must resign, he must stop using the cassock,” a federal senator was quoted as saying in a Mexican newspaper. “He should be in a psychiatric hospital.”

Several high-ranking Mexican Catholics, including some bishops, also have called for the removal of the 79-year-old abbot, whose recent attempts to break away from the Mexico City archdiocese have angered some. Indeed, some observers say Schulenburg may be the victim of church politics.

The uproar outside the Catholic hierarchy has been similarly intense.

In Ciuadad Juarez, a border city across from El Paso, Texas, protesters distributed fliers labeling the abbot a traitor and calling for him to step down.


Archbishop Norberto Rivera Carrera adopted a more conciliatory tone this past Sunday (June 2), saying that while “I, like millions of my brothers have felt hurt as a Mexican son … in no regard do I feel insulted because others of my brothers have exercised their right to disagree over a point in which all of us enjoy full liberty of conscience to believe or not believe according to their own reasons.”

The archbishop did not mention the abbot by name or say whether he would be removed from his post.

People in Mexico City talked about the issue on the radio, in taxis and at restaurants. A poll conducted by the Reforma newspaper in Mexico City showed that 73 percent of Mexicans believe the Virgin of Guadalupe exists.

“I thought he was going to say there had been another assassination,” cabdriver Gerardo Becerril recalled thinking after hearing a radio newscaster breathlessly announce he had shocking news.

Becerril said he reacted to Schulenburg’s comments the same way he did when he learned in 1994 that the leading presidential candidate had been murdered: “I was speechless.”

Legend has it that in 1531, after seeing a beautiful dark-skinned woman in a blue mantle trimmed in gold, Juan Diego told a priest he’d seen the Virgin Mary. The priest didn’t believe him until Juan Diego returned, said he’d had another vision and offered as proof his ragged cloak, emblazoned with the woman’s image. The priest ordered a church built on the hilltop where Juan Diego said he’d had the visions.


The colonial church, which by the 20th century was not big enough to accommodate the throngs of pilgrims, is now a museum. A modern church, which holds 10,000 people and has four moving walkways that pass beneath the sacred cloak, was built next door in 1976.

In the Ixtus interview, Schulenburg said of the cloak, which hangs above the altar where he has said countless Masses: “Undoubtedly it is very pretty,and if it was made by hand by an Indian, something which I believe … my respects for the Indian who painted it.”

As the controversy swelled, the faithful continued flocking to the shrine.

“What the abbot said doesn’t matter to us,” said Carolina Barrios de Sanchez, 37, who was at the church with her husband and 11-month-old daughter to give thanks for the infant’s successful heart operation.

“We are believers, regardless of what he says,” said Barrios de Sanchez, her knees muddied after a 100-yard crawl to the shrine.

MJP END FERGUSON

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