"The Church has an obligation to feed the poor, and we cannot spend all our money on buildings. However, there are many kinds of hunger. There is a hunger for bread, and we must give people food. But there is also a hunger for beauty--and there are very few beautiful places that the poor can get into. Here is a place of transcendent beauty, and it is as accessible to the homeless in the Tenderloin as it is to the mayor of San Francisco." (Dorothy Day, speaking in St. Mary's Cathedral in San Francisco)
"The appearance of Mary to the native Juan Diego on the hill of Tepeyac in 1531 had a decisive effect on evangelization. Its influence greatly overflows the boundaries of Mexico, spreading to the whole Continent. America, which historically has been, and still is, a melting-pot of peoples, has recognized in the mestiza face of the Virgin of Tepeyac, in Blessed Mary of Guadalupe, an impressive example of a perfectly inculturated evangelization." (Pope St. John Paul II, Ecclesia in America)
Earlier this semester, when my students were studying the colonization of the Americas, I had them read parts of a translation of the earliest record we have of the Guadalupe apparitions. We had just been discussing the horrific treatment perpetrated on the people of the Americas by Spanish soldiers, many of whom justified their imperial project on the grounds of evangelization but in fact cared for nothing of the sort (without disparagement intended towards those small groups of religious who came and valiantly spread the Gospel without sequestering land, money, or power for themselves). A Spanish Dominican friar, observing these crimes, remarked with ire that "the Spaniards, from the beginning of their first entrance upon America to this present day, were no more eager to promote the preaching of the Gospel of Christ to these nations, than if they had been dogs or beasts. Worst of all, they specifically laid many restrictions on the Religious, daily afflicting and persecuting them, so that they would not have time or leisure to attend to preaching and the Divine Service, for they looked upon that to be an obstacle to their getting gold, and raking up riches which their greed pressed them to obtain."
If I were in those circumstances, I thought as I prepared for class, what would I say to the faith of these men who came from without, who brought more disease and violence than they brought order and love? Why would God send the message of His universal redemption through people who did not live the universal love demanded by the Incarnation? Why would I accept a faith that seemed more an imposition of European-ness than a gift intended for the ends of the earth? To be honest, I thought, I probably wouldn't. The relationship of conqueror to conquered is not a relationship that manifests the living reality of the Church.
The ten years after Hernan Cortes landed in Mexico became ten years of increasing failure on the part of God's wayward Spanish sons to show the American people a Church is a mother and bride, not master. Could it be coincidence, then, that at Tepeyac He gave, not an education broken by sin and language barriers, but contact with the living reality of His Mother, Spouse of the Holy Spirit, the type par excellence of the Church Herself? You are mine, Juan Diego, she said, not because you are Spanish or European but because you are a man, just as my dearest Jesus was a man.
Someone once told me that people study history because they don't have the balls to study philosophy (rough paraphrase). Maybe, if you're a Gnostic (and then who cares what you have the balls to do anyhow?) But if you're Catholic, philosophical truth (logos, if you will) became incarnate at a particular time at a particular place. History is important to us because history is important to God. It matters not just that our Lady appeared, by when she appeared and where she appeared. She appeared in 1531 at Tepeyac because she was needed there. She was needed then.
I tried to say this in class somehow, but the reflection was still new and more tinged with awe than eloquence, so I'm not sure how much of what I tried to articulate above really made it from my heart into my students' minds. But I do remember that one of my students, who isn't always particularly attentive, was leaning forward in his chair with every ounce of concentration focused on what I was saying. When I bumbled my way rather clumsily into some kind of conclusion about the historical import of the event, his eyes got wide, and I almost started crying right there in class. I still do when I remember it, because I could see in his eyes that he got it. History was suddenly no longer one damn thing after another but a narrative unfurling within the providential grace of God.
Why do the liberal arts, the studia humanitatis matter to a developing country? After moments like that, how could one say they do not?
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