In Eye Of Miraculous Guadalupe Image, A Figure Believed That Of St. Juan Diego

By Michael H. Brown

This week, and really for much of the year, the secular press has been trying to stoke up controversies about the man who is canonized today, St. Juan Diego of Cuautitlan -- who saw the Mother of God on a hillside at a spot later known as Guadalupe. Among the controversies is St. Juan Diego's appearance: did he look as he is so often portrayed, with dark, pointed features -- which certain people think is too similar to the Spanish conquistadors -- or would the appearance of a Chichimeca Indian have been somewhat different?

We answer with this: if you want to know what Juan Diego really looked like, you may want to look into the eyes of the Guadalupe image.

That's right: there are many who believe that the eyes of the Guadalupe Virgin bear miraculous profiles -- inexplicable outlines of what look like faces (see below) -- and that one of them may be St. Juan Diego. When the eyes of the Guadalupe image are magnified and enhanced by computer, there are startling images that also include the features of an unidentified woman; an unknown bearded man; and the profile of what many believe to have been the bishop, Juan de Zummarraga.

"The image of the Virgin of Guadalupe, which has been given to me for study, contains in the cornea these reflections," noted an opthamaologist, Dr. Javier Torroella-Bueno. "In the images in question, there is a perfect collocation in the agreement with this principle, the distortion of the figures even concurring with the predicted curvature of the cornea."

In other words, like the eyes of a living person, those of the Guadalupe image seem to have photographically recorded scenes from back in 1531, and one of them may have been that of St. Diego visiting the bishop to show him roses that had miraculously sprouted by the hill of apparitions. It was while Juan was unfolding his  cloak or "tilma," which he had used to hold the roses, that a life-sized image of Mary was revealed, astonishing them both. A color image of a woman on a burlap cloak!

Bishop Zummarraga's jaw had to have dropped. We know he rose from his chair and fell to his knees. Others in the room did the same. Was this the scene the remarkable eyes recorded? As the flowers tumbled from the tilma, which dropped to Juan's knees, they saw the image of the Madonna, the famous image of an olive-complected woman with her hands folded near her heart, her head bent slightly to the right, looking down somberly.

The coloration seemed to be of no known combination of pigments or dye, and the colors changed when viewed from various distances, seeming more like the "surface sculpting" of a bird's feather or a butterfly's scales than any artificial coloring. Like the Shroud of Turin, there remains no rational explanation for how the image had gotten there.

Then there were those eyes! The images in them were only found by modern science, and while the first discovery was first made with the right eye, it is in the left that Juan Diego may have been recorded. Using a photograph of the image marked off in one-millimeter squares and computer amplification to magnify each square 2,500 times, a scientist named Dr. Jose Aste-Tonsmann found that in the iris could be seen at least four figures -- one of which appeared to be an Indian peasant with his hands lifted in prayer. "I believe, without fear of error, that this person is Juan Diego," wrote the respected scientist!

Dr. Tonsman theorized that the other figures were Bishop Zumarraga and a translator named Juan Gonalez "and were imprinted in the left eye of the picture at the time it made its miraculous appearance on the tilma," writes another scientist, Dr. Jody Brant Smith. "They are what the Virgin herself saw at that moment."

See story at www.sancta.org/eyes.html