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  • A Response to Stafford Poole
  • Timothy Matovina

I am grateful to the editors of The Catholic Historical Review and to Stafford Poole, C.M., for his willingness to engage in this exchange. Space does not permit me to comment on every item explicated by Father Poole. So I will attempt to delineate our major point of agreement, three major points on which I think Father Poole and I need to “agree to disagree,” and some concluding remarks on what I contend are important considerations for ongoing research on the origins and early development of the Guadalupe tradition.

Father Poole and I concur on an important distinction that needs to be kept in mind in this debate—namely the difference between the practice of Guadalupan devotion and the belief in an apparitions narrative. The fact that Spaniards and natives venerated Guadalupe does not demonstrate that they had knowledge of an apparition story. Father Poole actually claims that I do not concur with him on this point:

Failing to observe this distinction, Professor Matovina cites as evidence of native devotion the efforts of Archbishop Moya de Contreras and the Jesuit Superior General Everard Mercurian to secure a plenary indulgence for pilgrims to Tepeyac (1576). Yet it should be noted that neither one mentioned anything about miracles, apparitions, or special devotion by Spaniards or Indians at that location.

(p. 273)

However, I do make the distinction between devotional practice and belief in the apparitions at the outset of my essay:

[D]id reports of Juan Diego’s encounters with Guadalupe and her miraculous appearance on his tilma (cloak) initiate the chapel and its devotion, or is the apparition narrative a later invention that provided a mythical origin for an already existing image and pious tradition?

(p. 244)

Moreover, I present the documentation concerning the 1576 plenary indulgence as a primary source about indigenous devotion, and I make no claim that the source provides evidence for belief in apparitions or other miracles. As I wrote in my essay, the source states “the indigenous people’s ‘eminent devotion’ to Guadalupe had induced the conversion of numerous [End Page 284] natives ‘to faith in Christ’” (p. 255). Thus Father Poole and I agree that Guadalupan devotion and belief in the Guadalupe apparitions are separate elements of the Guadalupe tradition; the existence of one does not necessarily imply the existence of the other.

One point of disagreement is the weight of arguments from silence. The disagreement is not that I claim to have nullified all significance of this argument. Rather, my contention is that “arguments from silence are weakened to the degree that an event or tradition is less prominent during a particular source’s lifetime and therefore less likely to be mentioned in their written records” (p. 250). Thus the fact that Guadalupan devotion was decidedly local during its first century of development is an important consideration in assessing the relative weight of arguments from silence about it. Father Poole demonstrates in Our Lady of Guadalupe that Guadalupan devotion had a relatively limited sphere of influence during its first century of development, but nonetheless contends that sixteenth-century sources should be expected to mention it. My point is that, since Guadalupe’s rise to national fame was gradual—claims that her reported apparitions were a prodigious event in Mexican history began only in the seventeenth century—it is not surprising that earlier sources are less likely to take note of the tradition.

I conclude that

[a]lthough this inconsistency does not completely invalidate Poole’s argument, the extent to which he is correct about the gradual increase of a local devotion undermines his argument from silence among those he asserts historians should reasonably expect to have spoken.

(p. 253)

Father Poole responds that “the local character does not explain the silences of persons who would logically have been expected to comment on it” (p. 282). I agree that the local character does not explain away the historical silences, but I think it is logical to contend that the degree of anonymity of any devotion increases the possibility that historical figures will neglect to mention it. Father Poole goes on to state that “the evidence for the...

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