Letter on the Origin of the Image of Our Lady of Guadalupe

The preface to the printed edition tells how the letter came to be written. In 1883 the archbishop of Mexico, Pelagio Antonio de Labastida y Dávalos, asked García Icazbalceta for his opinion of a manuscript defending the apparitions. He declined, saying that he was neither a theologian nor a canonist; the archbishop answered that he asked him as a man versed in the church history of the country, and he then wrote this letter. He closes by asking that it be shown to no one else. This edition, which calls itself the first complete and correct one, was printed in 1896, two years after his death.

The letter is a historian’s review of the evidence. It is cited in this wiki for two things: its statement that Zumárraga’s surviving writings nowhere mention the apparition or the name Guadalupe (paragraph 12), and its summary of the inquiry of 1556 into a sermon preached against the devotion (paragraph 30). It is scholarship of the nineteenth century. Its author writes as a Catholic devoted to the Virgin who wished the account true and did not find it so (paragraph 70); he leaves the theological question, and the weight of the Church’s approval, to the archbishop (paragraph 69).