MEXICO CITY (Reuters) - The road to sainthood is not smooth. Vatican theologians pick apart the lives of candidates to determine worthiness. Then there's the requirement of performing two "miracles."
A greater-than-usual uncertainty cloaks the figure who will become the America's first Indian saint on July 31, when aging Pope John Paul II, leader of the world's 1 billion Catholics, visits Mexico for the fifth time.
Did Juan Diego -- a humble Indian whose visions of the Virgin Mary in 1531 generated one of Mexico's central cultural and religious symbols, the Virgin of Guadalupe -- even exist?
Historians, including some church experts, argue there is no proof that he did. But the church has ruled out an open debate on the issue and priests who have dared to question the canonization have suffered harsh retribution.
Those who oppose the move say the church is fabricating a saint at the risk of alienating those who support a more rational approach. Meanwhile, some Juan Diego supporters have hinted that his detractors are racist.
"The value of this canonization is very doubtful, not only for many academics ... but also for a lot of educated people ... who prefer not to speak about it because it has become so emotional," a group of priests wrote to the Vatican in a letter that came to light in a new book, "In Search of Juan Diego," by Mexican priest and scholar Manuel Olimon,
Juan Diego had been dead more than a 100 years before anyone bothered to write about him, historians say. And European traditions, not local legends, were the basis for a 1648 theological tract that first refers to Juan Diego.
But Catholic Church officials say they have dug up plenty of evidence of Juan Diego, including Indian narratives and 16th Century documents that tell of how the cult of the Virgin Mary gathered strength in Mexico soon after the Spanish conquest.
A movement to canonize Juan Diego, led by Archbishop Norberto Rivera, has successfully pushed the cause before the Vatican, and a date has been set.
Failing health could foil the 82-year-old pope's planned trip to Mexico. But he is said to have a great desire to once again visit this nation of 100 million, the second biggest Catholic country after Brazil, and to canonize Juan Diego.
BRIDGE BETWEEN CONQUERORS AND CONQUERED
Without Juan Diego, the church may have failed in drawing Mexicans to the faith of their Spanish conquerors. Making him a saint is seen as vindicating ordinary Mexicans with mixed Spanish and Indian blood.
Archbishop Rivera says Juan Diego was chosen by the Virgin Mary as the bridge between natives and conquering Spaniards, helping them overcome hatred left from the bloody conquest.
And Rivera has apparently dealt harshly with naysayers.
Monsignor Guillermo Schulenberg, the abbot who built a modern chapel to the Virgin of Guadalupe during his 33 years in charge of the basilica, was forced out of his position in the mid-1990s after he expressed doubts that Juan Diego was a flesh-and-blood being, according to a recent book "Mexican Phoenix" by British historian David Brading.
And Olimon's book claims high-ranking priest Carlos Warnholtz lost his retirement housing at the Basilica after signing letters to the Vatican questioning the canonization.
"The great majority of both clerics and bishops prefer to remain silent about the matter, because if you resist it, you're liable to lose your position," Brading told Reuters.
Jose Luis Guerrero, a priest at the Basilica and one of the church's leading Juan Diego historians, denied there has been any campaign against the detractors. "On the contrary, up until now the church has asked for every type of opinion," he said.
The debate over the opinions is private within the Congregation for the Causes of Saints at the Vatican, he said, and once the Pope canonizes Juan Diego, the sainthood cannot be questioned because it will be part of church dogma.
If he did not exist, Juan Diego would not be the first saint who is more myth than man. In 1969 the Church purged its calendar of saints that research showed probably never lived.
EVERYONE KNOWS THE STORY
All Mexicans are familiar with the story of the apparitions on Tepeyac hill -- where Indians once worshiped their goddess Tonantzin -- near the center of modern Mexico City.
In December 1531, just 10 years after the Spanish conquered the major Indian city Tenochtitlan, the Virgin Mary appeared four times to Juan Diego and told him to have the church's first bishop in Mexico build a temple in her name.
The bishop rejected Juan Diego until he appeared with the virgin's image miraculously emblazoned on his rough cloak.
The framed image of Mary in a star-decorated cloak looking gently downward to this day hangs above the altar at the enormous Basilica to the Virgin of Guadalupe in Mexico City, where it is the object of intense devotion.
Some 17 million pilgrims visit the shrine every year, many of them walking long distances, clogging the basilica with emotion, awe and thousands of offerings of flowers.
To manage the throng and prevent traffic jams, the Basilica has a conveyor belt that passes people under the image.
Art experts say the image was painted by a human well after 1531, but most Mexicans believe in the miracle.
THE WAR OF THE BOOKS
As canonization approaches, the debate over Juan Diego intensifies. Soon after Olimon's book came out, Rivera came out in fierce defense of Juan Diego in his own book.
"You have to look at all the proof, and if the Spanish, indigenous and mixed-race proofs converge, that is when we can say there is a true historical foundation," the archbishop said at his book launch.
Brading says Juan Diego for centuries had been seen simply as a humble messenger, and that the drive to make him a saint began in the 1900s and has been pushed as a way of reducing the continuing gulf between the church and Indians.
But Rivera says Juan Diego, whom he calls by his Indian name Cuauhtlatoatzin or Talking Eagle, has had followers from the beginning.
A key piece of the evidence is a codice -- a leather parchment dated 1548 and bearing a drawing of the apparition -- that appeared in the mid-1990s. Rev. Xavier Escalada says he found the codice, which had been lost for centuries, in a book donated to him when he sought material for an encyclopedia on the Virgin of Guadalupe.
Rafael Tena, the National Anthropology Museum's codice expert, says the parchment is a fake, too good to be true.
But Escalada says it's too good not to be true. "We could not have hoped for anything better. It has all the facts we were missing. That's why they attack it because it's so good."
For Escalada the codice was like a miracle almost as great as the miracles that won Juan Diego his pending sainthood.
Juan Diego was beatified in 1990, the last step before sainthood, because the apparition of the Virgin qualified as a miracle. But he needed one more miracle to become a saint.
That came when a young Mexican suffered massive head injuries after jumping out of a window in 1990. His rapid recovery, after his mother prayed to Juan Diego, stunned his doctor. In 1998 the Vatican accepted the cure as a miracle.