Our Lady of Guadalupe and the Conquest of Darkness
By Warren H. Carroll
1983 Christendom Press softcover 123 pp.
"Oh God!", cried Cortes, "Why dost thou permit the devil to be so grossly honored in the land?" He bowed his head and added, "Accept, O Lord, that we may serve Thee in this land." .... then he turned and faced the Hummingbird Wizard, it's obscene bulk rose up before him as though to fill the earth and all the sky. Somewhere near the door was a metal bar. Cortes seized it. He swung it over his head....[he] leapt up in a supernatural way and swung forward holding the bar midway till he struck the idol high up on its eyes, and broke off its gold mask, saying: "We must risk something for God."
And with that came the first blow to a truly evil empire that was being held in thrall to Satan. As the title of the book implies, Warren Carroll's "Our Lady of Guadalupe and the Conquest of Darkness", is a tale of two contiguous events that occurred in the first half of the 16th Century that would forever change the landscape of the New World. The first story - The Conquest of Darkness - is that of Hernán Cortés de Monroy y Pizarro, who's horrific discovery of human sacrifice on a scale unimagined and unparalleled in human history - until the passing of Roe vs. Wade in the 1970's - drove him to overthrow Montezuma's Aztec Empire against fantastic odds. Carroll, as do other historians of the period, relies heavily on the eye-witness accounts of Bernal Díaz del Castillo, and of surviving Aztec records of the events.
The second story, Our Lady of Guadalupe, takes much less room to tell. It's the story of Juan Diego, an Aztec convert to whom the Blessed Virgin Mary appeared on Tepeyac hill. The miracle of the image of Our Lady on the tilma presented to Bishop Juan de Zumárraga was the prelude to another miracle - that of an outpouring of grace that led to the most stunning mass conversion to Christianity since the Apostolic and Patristic ages.
Carroll's story-telling abilities and fact-gathering are substantial. He is always balanced in his presentation, never hiding the sinful side of man that always lurks behind even the most sublime events of history: the shadow of Judas; the tares ever-present among the wheat. So well written is this book, it's very likely that after reading it you'll seek out more works by Carroll. I highly recommend his six-volume history of the Catholic Church, A History of Christendom. The events that take place in this book are digested in volume 4 of that series.
A topic mentioned by Carroll at the very end of the book bears some attention because it is a sign of the Holy Spirit working in the Church. One of the compelling facets of the faith is the symmetry that is found throughout it: in scripture, in liturgy, in theology, and in practice - it's literally everywhere in the faith. Sometimes this symmetry will take the form of paradox: the horizontal and vertical of the cross, the 'kissing' of justice and mercy, reaching eternal life through temporal death. Sometimes the symmetry is found in the balance of the archetypes of the Old Testament with their fulfillment in the New: circumcision and baptism, the sacrificed lamb of the Pasch and the sacrificed Lamb of God, the fall through Eve and the redemption through Mary. The reason symmetry is so compelling is because it is an attribute of the beautiful, and beauty is an attribute of God: i.e., one of the things that helps lead us to Him.
The symmetrical beauty found in the theological, scriptural, and liturgical aspects of the Church, also holds true for historical symmetry, and one of the great symmetrical instances of history is that of the conversion of Mexico to the Catholic faith just as, a half a world away, a nearly identical number of Catholics and England were being forcibly removed from the Church by Henry VIII. The timelines are so close, one can only see the hand of God in them. Just as St. Thomas More is being executed for not acquiescing to recognizing Henry as head of the Church in England and the rest of the English bishops are apostatizing, in Mexico, Juan Diego is bearing witness to the Mother of God and it's all that the Spanish bishops can do to keep up with the native people's demands to be baptized. How utterly symmetrical. How utterly Catholic.
I highly recommend this book for all Catholics. If you've seen Mel Gibson's "Apocalypto" and wondered about the historical underpinnings of it, this book will be of enormous value to you. The chapters below show the topics and organization of this book:
1. More Than a World Apart (1487)
Part I: The Physical Conquest of Mexico
2. The Shores of the Nightmare (1517-19)
3. The March of the Skulls (1519)
4. In the Keep of the Hummingbird Wizard (1519-20)
5. The Night of Sorrow (1520)
6. Never Call Retreat (1520-21)
7. The Wizard Dethroned (1521)
Part II
8. Twelve Poor Men (1521-27)
9. Protector of the Indians (1527-31)
10. The Portrait of the Mother of God (December 1531)
11. Nine Million Baptisms (1532-48)
12. "Am I Not Here?"
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