PRIME TIME
April 2017
The Mystery Of The Blue Lady
By Shannon Wagers
I
n the history and folklore
of New Mexico there is
no shortage of seemingly
miraculous events, often ascribed
to individuals of exceptional piety
or spiritual power. One of the most
remarkable of these stories concerns
Sor María de Jesús de Ágreda, a
17th –century Spanish nun.
She was born in 1602 to an
upper-middle class family that
had originally been Jewish but
had converted to Christianity a
few generations earlier under a
royal edict that required Jews and
Muslims in Spain to convert or face
expulsion. Nevertheless they were
a pious Catholic family, perhaps
all the more devout because of
insecurity about their Jewish roots.
Like most girls of her day, María
was educated at home.
When María was just 12, her
mother was told in a vision that
the entire family should enter holy
orders and turn their spacious
ancestral home into a convent,
which they did. Her parents
dissolved their marriage and took
vows of chastity. Her father and
brothers became Franciscan lay
brothers, while she and her mother
and sister became nuns, taking
the blue habit of the Franciscan
Conceptionist order.
At the age of 17, or perhaps
earlier, María began to experience
visions of her own. She was
concerned—obsessed might be a
better word—about the fate of the
native peoples of Spain’s far-flung
empire who, she feared, would face
damnation if they died unbaptized.
In her visions she felt herself to be
transported to America, looking
down from above upon these
“barbarous nations” whose souls the
Franciscan friars were then working
to save. For some reason, her
attention was particularly focused
on New Mexico and the Southwest,
which had only recently been
colonized.
Although she never traveled
beyond the vicinity of her home
town of Ágreda, in north-central
Spain, María was intelligent and
well-read, and undoubtedly had
learned something about New
Mexico, possibly from a friar
who had served in the missions
there. Between 1620 and 1623,
she reportedly made over 500
spiritual journeys to the Southwest,
a phenomenon known as
“bilocation,” or being in two places
at once. Today we would call these
“out-of-body experiences,” and it
has been suggested that they were
brought on by excessive fasting.
Whatever the cause, María was
troubled by them and begged God
to withdraw his “gift.” After 1623,
the bilocations ceased, but by then
María’s reputation as a mystic was
well-established.
It would be easy to dismiss
these spiritual journeys as the
hallucinations of a half-starved
religious fanatic, except for the
fact that reports from New Mexico
appeared to confirm them.
In 1625, Fray Alonso de
Benavides left Mexico City and
headed north with the biennial
mission-supply caravan to assume
his new post as Superior, or Custos,
in charge of the Franciscan missions
of New Mexico. Before leaving he
had received a letter informing him
of the stories circulating in Spain
about María’s ministry among the
Indians and asking him to look into
the matter.
Upon arriving at Isleta Pueblo,
Benavides learned that Jumanas
Indians from the plains of west
Texas had indeed come to the
mission there asking to receive
baptism, claiming that they had
been sent by a beautiful lady in
a blue cloak who preached to
them miraculously in their own
language and then disappeared
into the clouds. When he returned
to Spain he included this and
similar stories in his report to
King Felipe IV in 1630, which he
subsequently revised and sent to
the pope in 1634. Benavides also
met with María and found that
her descriptions of the land and
the people of the Southwest were
accurate, although she had never
physically been there.
For many, this is proof enough
that the story is true. But others are
skeptical, and their arguments are
worth considering.
First, they point out that
Benavides was hardly an impartial
witness. He was an advocate for the
Franciscan order, which enjoyed a
monopoly on all aspects of religious
life in New Mexico, but which was
often criticized by other orders
(notably the Jesuits) for the practice
of baptizing Indians wholesale
before they had been properly
instructed in the faith. If a miracle
could be confirmed that seemed to
indicate that God approved of their
efforts, so much the better for the
Franciscans.
5
In his interviews with the Indians
it is not unlikely that Benavides
asked them leading questions and
that the Indians told him what
they thought he wanted to hear, as
they often did when dealing with
Spanish authorities. As for María’s
descriptions of New Mexico, say
the skeptics, we should r emember
that she had the opportunity to
read Benavides’ report before he
interviewed her and may have taken
her cues from it. She, too, had a
motive for telling him what he
wanted to hear, for he was not only
a high-ranking cleric but also an
officer of the Inquisition.
María went on to write several
books, including a purported
autobiography of the Virgin Mary,
for which she is best known to the
rest of the world. It was supposedly
dictated to her by Mary herself and
was titled The Mystical City of God.
But here in New Mexico she is
remembered as the mysterious Blue
Lady of Las Jumanas. She died in
1665, at the age of 63. Despite the
efforts of many advocates for her
cause, she has never been elevated
to sainthood.
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