On the Feast day of Our Lady of Guadalupe earlier this week, Pope Francis, celebrating in the Vatican, offered some helpful insights into how her apparition might be celebrated.
As the world has become increasingly hyper-sensitive to issues of race, the skin colour of Mary as our Lady of Guadalupe has become a politicised issue.
This is nothing new. The Left have been long been irritated by the portrayal of Jesus as having white skin and fair hair. There has been a growing anger against white Europeans for mis-portraying Jesus in their own image.
It’s certainly the case that the more olive skin tone of Mediterranean cultures is very different from fair haired Anglo-Saxon identities, and portraying Jesus as white-skinned and fair-haired is an act of cultural appropriation that offends many. But the problem with racism awareness is that it causes the very problem it objects to. The moment one’s sensitivities to skin colour are awakened no tone of skin colour is ever politically neutral again.
A similar shadow has been cast over our Lady of Guadalupe. There were a number of elements of the apparition of Our Lady in Mexico which allowed her presence to be owned by the indigenous people, not least the geography of Mexico itself. Europe had a long and varied history of her intervention in time and place and it did not take a great leap of theological imagination to see the intervention of Our Lady in Mexico as an evangelistic initiative of the greatest importance. Just as Europe was turning its back on the faith with the schism of the Reformation, so the eye of God appeared to turn to the New World. Just as the Catholic Church was being repudiated by Europeans whose culture had been rescued from paganism by Catholic missionaries, and beginning the long degradation of the Faith that began with Protestantism but would end with atheistic materialism, so the New World was opened to the power of the Gospel by the miraculous intervention of Our Lady.
Pope Francis had been made aware that different political factions have begun to squabble about the shade of skin colour used in representing our Lady of Guadalupe.
The Pope warned against any ideological exploitation of the image of the Guadalupe Virgin, whose mixed “mestiza” complexion has long been held up by the Catholic Church as allowing a more affirmative association with indigenous culture in the encounter between Europe and the Americas.
Pope Francis, aware that the church preparations are underway for the 500th anniversary celebrations of the original apparition, called for them to take place in the context of the true “spirit” of Guadalupe.
“I am concerned about ideological-cultural proposals from various places that want to appropriate the encounter of a people with their Mother, who want to desmestizaje and put make-up on the Mother,” he said.
The apparition of our Lady constituted a certain symbolism of Mexican mestizaje, the blending of Indigenous and Spanish cultures. Tragically the Virgin of Guadalupe has recently been targeted for desmestizaje, the Pope said, by both the left and right.
He said some on the left view her as purely indigenous, while some on the right object to her darkening skin tone in portraits over time “and prefer to view her as a lighter complected, European-style advocation of Mary”.
Francis entreated those who claimed the intervention of our Lady of Guadalupe as supportive of their own more political agendas to not take away from the centrality of Guadalupe to the faithful of the Americas.
“Please let’s not allow the message to be distilled into mundane and ideological patterns,” he said.
The Pope’s plea to allow the spirituality that flowed from the significance of our Lady’s intervention in Mexico to remain free of attempts to politicise her comes at a timely moment.
And yet, at the same time, and no doubt meaning well pastorally, Pope Francis spoke about his sympathy with Latin Americans “seeking freedom and well-being in their caravans that sought entry to the United States”.
Critics have suggested that in offering his support to the vast numbers that are seeking illegal entry into the United States in order to improve their standard of living he too is mixing spirituality with politics and confusing the categories of political and economic migrants.
By offering papal solidarity and his implied blessing to illegal economic migration, he is conflating economic aspiration with the suffering of political refugees fleeing persecution. “Economic freedom and well-being” are not obviously the currency of the New Testament but belong instead to the lexicon of the political Left.
It has been suggested that there is an unhelpful ambiguity in suggesting that the spirituality of Our Lady of Guadalupe remain free of political leverage, while offering spiritual affirmation to illegal economic migration and so presenting a political and economic movement in terms of a legitimate spiritual pilgrimage.
Perhaps the wisdom of the papal intervention to keep a distinction between the significance of the spiritual and the political in the matter of the Virgin of Guadalupe should be extended to the contentious political debate over the virtues of economic migration?
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