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The Catholic Historical Review 89.1 (2003) 118-119



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Guadalupe: Our Lady of New Mexico. By Jacqueline Orsini Dunnington. (Santa Fe: Museum of New Mexico Press. 1999. Pp. xviii, 189. 15 color, 32 b&w photographs. $45.00 hardback; $24.95 paperback.) [End Page 118]

Miracles are said to occur at the beginning of new evangelization in condescension to the immaturity of the unconverted and the newly converted. Therefore heavenly pronouncements, visions, locutions, speaking in tongues, ecstasies, healings, and other such miracles are something of an insult to well-informed cradle Catholics and cradle Christians. God's grace in word and sacrament ought to be enough. But it isn't.

The Guadalupe apparition is, in its strange way, a permanent miracle, as has been thought of the mandylion of Abgar of Edessa, Veronica's veil, and the shroud of Turin. The Guadalupe tilma is far more likely than the others to withstand continued testing as scientific method develops. The Shroud of Turin failed the carbon-dating test several years ago, though as a matter of fact Herbert Thurston's article "Shroud" in the old Catholic Encyclopedia told the Church in the 1910's all we need to know.

Even if it were not a miracle, the Guadalupe tilma has certainly been for the people of New Spain (including the U.S. Southwest) a providential legacy. If it is "of God," we can be bold enough to recognize in the calm, serious maiden the feminine face of the divine. After serving in her first century or so as a "mother of miracles," La Criolla (the American-born woman of old-world ancestry [p. xiii]) has come to be an abiding symbol of hope for the marginalized, the oppressed, and the suffering.

Jacqueline Orsini Dunnington is certainly both scholarly in her argumentation and prudent in her judgments, but it is at the same time quite plain that her book is as much an act of devotion as an act of scholarship. She gathers and evaluates all information and misinformation as accurately as possible. She has good instincts about debated issues (that is to say, she almost always agrees with me); I especially commend her description of the infra-red analysis performed by the Franciscan Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate and written up by Philip Serna Callahan. This study showed that all of the gold, all of the black, the swag of drapery across the Virgin's feet, the moon, and the angel (not to mention the crown and roses that were painted out a century ago) were all added about 1600. The bottom-line result is that the indigenista interpretation of the image as popularly received is false; the image has now stopped talking second-rate sociology and simply says, "Here I am for you."

The down side: I found the index scanty and the bibliography lacking in the newer and better parallels—Matt Pearce's New Mexico Place Names but not Bob Julyan's Place Names of New Mexico, Manuel Espinosa's books on Diego de Vargas but not those by John Kessell et al. And I make my usual plea to regional publishers to do their readers a big favor by providing more editorial help to their authors; I found a few parts of the book unnecessarily difficult to read. But the up side is the real story: this book is as good a book as there is on Guadalupe—especially so for readers who prefer a New Mexican point of view.

 



Thomas J. Steele, S.J.
Regis University, Denver
University of New Mexico, Albuquerque

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