A large, lavishly illustrated coffee-table book with some interesting insights into Our Lady of Guadalupe and an extremely questionable understanding of 16th century history.
To start: the book looks lovely, with hundreds of pictures both of the image itself and various historical documents, illustrations, and pictures from Mexico. I found Guadalupe Mysteries in my parish’s Adoration chapel, probably its ideal home. (This being said, there were still a surprising number of grammatical errors and inconsistent fonts/typesetting.)
Should you commit to reading the book cover to cover, you will get some interesting insights into the “code” hidden within the image of Our Lady. As a recent convert, I knew very little about the apparition and its relationship to Aztec imagery, Spanish artistic conventions, or the geography of Mexico. Guadalupe Mysteries references an extensive body of scientific research surrounding the image and, one assumes, accurately synthesizes these findings.
However, if you commit to reading the book cover-to-cover, you will also find some extremely questionable depictions of pre-Columbian Mexican history.
First off, the repeated use of the word “Indian” to represent all the indigenous inhabitants of Mexico/Central America before Columbus.
Secondly, the commitment to absolve every Catholic in the New World of any and all responsibility for the destruction of the Aztec empire. Of course, Górny and Rosikón cannot completely wipe the historical record of the atrocities committed by the conquistadors, but these atrocities were certainly only committed by “the bad men,” not virtuous Catholics like Columbus or Cortés.
The continual insistence that the Catholic church (and, by extension, the Spanish Empire) bears no blame for the genocide of indigenous peoples in the New World is both baffling and frustrating. History, as has been shown again and again, is not black and white. It cannot neatly be divided into good and evil, right and wrong. The Aztecs were, by all accounts, quite brutal in their treatment of neighboring tribes and were devoted practitioners of human sacrifice. Conversely, many Spanish religious were fierce advocates for indigenous rights. Were the Aztecs “bad,” then, and the Spanish “good”? Did the Aztecs deserve to lose their empire and be subjugated to Spain? Were the conquistadors justified because they brought Catholicism along with disease and slavery and death? To all these, the book answers subtly and (much less subtly): yes.
“European civilization was superior to Indian civilization in many respects,” Górny and Rosikón conclude (215). In other words: “Conquest is good because at least it made you Catholic.”
And yet the insistence on justifying both conquest and Empire seems completely at odds with the message of Our Lady itself. If the apparition of Our Lady is remarkable precisely because it spoke to both Aztec and Spanish descendants, then surely Our Lady represents a third way, a path between human sacrifice and brutal colonial expansion. Surely, she is healing divisions, forging a new people and (eventually) a new national identity.
The book itself tells us this in the early chapters, and yet the strange insistence that “Catholics did nothing wrong” works against the much more powerful message that what is broken and ruined by man in his greed and his pride can ultimately be healed by Christ and his Blessed Mother.
2.5 stars.