What Juan Diego Saw: The story of a new saint.

On July 31, Pope John Paul II appeared before more than a million cheering, weeping Catholics in Mexico City, and declared a 16th-century Indian named Juan Diego, believed to be part of one of the most famous miracles in Christian history, a saint of the Roman Catholic Church. There are those within the Church, though, who believe the Holy Father has bequeathed to the Church a holy ghost.

That is, they claim there is no solid reason to believe that the Indian shepherd to whom the beloved Virgin of Guadalupe is said to have appeared in 1531 existed at all. It's not just the usual suspects making these claims, but also Catholic priests who once served at Mexico City's basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe -- including its longtime abbot. In December 1999, a Mexican newspaper made public a letter the clerics had written to John Paul, asking him to delay Juan Diego's canonization until more evidence could be marshaled.

The abbot, Guillermo Schulenberg, was warned by Mexico's primate that he was risking excommunication by publicly doubting the existence of Juan Diego. And Schulenberg became an instant figure of scorn among Mexicans, for whom devotion to Our Lady of Guadalupe is at the core of both religious and national consciousness. True story: An American Catholic priest friend serving in a Mexican village told me that a Protestant evangelist came to town, and roused a crowd of evangelical converts by condemning the Catholic Church; but when he spoke out against the Guadalupe apparition, the people drove him out of town.

To understand what Guadalupe means to Mexicans, you have to consider the tremendous religious and cultural significance of what is said to have happened on December 9-12, 1531. Juan Diego was the baptismal name of Cuautlactoactizin, one of the relatively few Indians to embrace Christianity after the arrival of the Spanish conquistadores. As the story goes, the Virgin appeared to Juan Diego on a hill where a temple to an Aztec goddess once stood, and asked him in the Nahuatl language to approach Bishop Juan de Zumarraga to build a church in her honor there. The bishop did not believe the poor Indian, and asked him to bring back evidence. On December 12, the Virgin appeared and showed him a rosebush in full bloom atop the hill, a highly unusual event in the middle of winter. She instructed him to gather the roses to bring to the bishop as proof.

When Juan Diego appeared before Zumarraga, he opened his cloak, called a tilma, to spread the roses onto the floor -- and the bishop and others were stunned to see an iridescent image of the Virgin imprinted on the interior of the tilma. This same five-by-three-foot tilma can be seen today in a large reliquary behind the altar in the new Guadalupe basilica, built next to the site of the miraculous hill. Though it is made of cactus fiber that should have decayed after 20 years, the tilma remains unblemished nearly five centuries later.

The Guadalupe image itself was fraught with symbolic meaning. The Virgin on the cloak appears as a pregnant Indian woman dressed in colors indicating (to Aztec eyes) royalty and divinity, and the stars on her cloak replicate the constellation over Mexico City on the day of her appearance. The name she asked Juan Diego to call her -- Our Lady of Guadalupe -- is believed by many to be the Spanish transliteration of a Nahuatl word meaning "the one who crushes the serpent." A chief Aztec deity was Quetzalcoatl, or "Plumed Serpent," to whom Aztec priests sacrificed tens of thousands of living human beings each year.

In the Catholic view, the Guadalupe image is a sign to the Aztecs that Christianity, the religion of the Spanish, had come to defeat their bloodthirsty paganism. But Guadalupe cannot be reduced to crude triumphalism: The Mother of Christ appears as an Indian queen and mother, representing the benevolent universality of Christianity, and prophesying the unity of the New World Spanish and Indians to create a new culture. Within a few years of the image's being made known to the Aztecs, millions abandoned the old religion and were baptized. If Guadalupe is fake, it is one of the greatest pieces of religious and political propaganda of all time.

That, indeed, is what some Mexican social critics say, calling Guadalupe a conquistador ruse to hoodwink and subdue the Indians. Others claim that John Paul is continuing in that tradition, canonizing Juan Diego for essentially propagandistic reasons, chiefly to halt the conversion of modern-day Mexican Indians to Protestantism, renewed paganism, or political radicalism.

For his part, the Pope has said he wants St. Juan Diego to be seen as a symbol of the contribution indigenous people have made to Catholicism, and of the unification of the descendants of the natives and the colonizers in shared Christian faith. That's a worthy goal, but achieving it would not justify the certification of a lie -- which is what those who doubt Juan Diego's existence say has probably happened.

It should be remembered that the Catholic Church has, in recent times, admitted that it has no reason to believe that certain saints ever lived. In 1969, the Church revised its calendar of feast days when it said there was insufficient evidence to believe that particular saints, such as the beloved St. Christopher, existed outside of pious legend. Throughout most of the Church's history, saints -- that is, Christians who were believed by the Church to be in heaven by virtue of their holy lives or martyrs' deaths -- were made by popular acclamation, which is not the most precise and accurate way of doing so.

Today, however, the saint-making process is long and arduous, and extremely careful. Detailed work on Juan Diego's canonization has taken 22 years. Some scientific tests cast doubt on the authenticity of the image and the tilma, while others uphold its inexplicability (among them, fascinating studies, done with high-powered instruments, which purport to detect in the Virgin's eye the optically correct images of Bishop Zumarraga and others, presumably as the cloak was first unfurled). In any case, the cloak has never been subjected to the kind of intense scientific examination that the Shroud of Turin has.

In Juan Diego's case, the main historicist complaint by skeptics has been that there are no written records of his existence prior to 1648. Vatican investigators say that many Indian documents from that era were destroyed, in part due to a paper shortage, or lost in the great Mexico City fire of 1692. The Church believes, though, that it has discovered the equivalent of Juan Diego's death certificate. What's more, a Spanish Jesuit in 1997 uncovered the so-called Escalada Codex, a document drawn on dried animal skin, dated 1548, featuring an image of the Virgin of Guadalupe and the inscription, "Also in 1531 our beloved mother was seen by Cuautlactoactizin, our child, of Guadalupe in Mexico." The codex contains the signatures of a priest and a judge of the era, both of which have been authenticated from other historical documents.

Further documents attest to Juan Diego's existence, though not as definitively as the codex, and there is a strong Indian oral tradition about Juan Diego that the Vatican has accepted as reliable. And recent archaeological discoveries in Georgia, site of a Spanish expedition contemporaneous with Juan Diego's life, turned up a gravestone image of a man on his knees before an apparition of the Virgin of Guadalupe.

Of no value to secular historians, but of supreme value to the faithful, are the two miracles that the Church now requires for canonization. The most recent one was the astonishing recent recovery of a Mexico City man from a suicide attempt, after his mother sought Juan Diego's intercession for her son's life. It was ruled inexplicable by natural means by the council of doctors and scientists retained by the Vatican to investigate it. To the Church, verified miracles seal the case for Juan Diego's being in heaven.

"That's exactly what the function of those miracles" is supposed to be, says Kenneth Woodward, author of Making Saints. "You need science to disprove things in the canonization process. Modern miracles are almost all healings in hospitals. In most cases, the doctors investigating them are not even Catholic."

Of course, if it is a matter of faith that Juan Diego could not have existed, no amount of historical evidence will suffice to prove the contrary. The July 31 canonization will not quell the debate among dissident historians, but as far as Mexican Catholics are concerned, the debate is over, and the humble Indian peasant whose memory has been venerated in their land for almost 500 years has finally received his due from the institutional Church. As one Guadalupe devotee told a reporter, "I recognize these men have a right to their opinions, and I respect that. But now they should respect the Mexican people and shut up."