Our Lady of Guadalupe’s story: ‘The Blood & the Rose’

By Carol Baass Sowa
Today's Catholic

SAN ANTONIO • Our Lady of Guadalupe is not just a Mexican story, declares Tim Watkins. “She is a global story and she relates to us a global responsibility that we have a duty to Christ to spread the word.” Watkins, president and CEO of Renegade Productions and Leo McWatkins Films, is director of the documentary, “The Blood & The Rose,” which was screened with an evening of spiritual reflection at St. Joseph Parish on Dec. 8.

This documentary on the Virgin Mary’s 1531 apparition in Mexico to the humble Native American — now saint — Juan Diego, investigates the historical, scientific and spiritual significance of this event. Filmed at locations that included Mexico and Spain, it premiered in Washington, D.C. in January 2013, followed by screenings throughout the United States and abroad, with three showings at World Youth Day in Rio de Janeiro.

Watkins’ path to what he knows is his calling had an unlikely start with a finance-accounting degree and helping fund the start-up of a new company for a college friend in 1988. Along the way he picked up skills in sales and customer service and developed a creative eye, to the point where he finally followed a friend’s suggestion to get into documentary film-making.

From this came his co-directing and producing the award-winning “In the Face of Evil: Reagan’s War in Word and Deed.” A fan of this film, Gary McEveety, who was Mel Gibson’s producer for “The Passion of the Christ,” had been approached by people from Mexico City interested in getting a film made on Our Lady of Guadalupe. Not being a documentary maker, McEveety referred them to Watkins.

“At the time,” says Watkins, “I was two years fully into my spiritual awakening and I couldn’t believe I was getting a call to make a documentary film on a spiritual occurrence like Our Lady of Guadalupe.” Like many living north of the border, he had always thought of this apparition as “a Mexican thing,” but, as he says, “Boy, were my eyes opened! The reality is that she is the patroness of all life, from conception to natural death. She is the patroness of the Americas.”

The documentary was seven years in the making and an early hurdle was finding an authentic Catholic writer, Watkins confides. After several false starts, a chat with a visitor to Renegade Productions’ facilities in Maryland led to a writer from Spain, Gonzalo Ortiz del Hoyo, who also happened to be an Opus Dei numerary. It was the perfect fit, though the script’s well-researched 400 pages had to ultimately be whittled down to the current 90-minute production.

“The Blood & The Rose,” Watkins relates, gets its title from the “enormous amount of blood shed in error and in defense of the One True God.” This notably included the Aztecs’ bloody human sacrifices. While they had a beautiful mindset of faith and extraordinary devotion to a god system, Watkins explains, they had gone too far in offering homage. “What they had lost,” he says, “was the translation that Christ had already done that sacrifice for them.”

Watkins sees a similarity between the Aztecs and today’s society, where people have lost their way, except instead of worshipping a pagan God, they worship the god of “me-ism,” putting themselves first. “That’s why we have such difficulties today with abortion and lack of consideration of the sanctity of life and its late stages and so forth,” he adds. “It’s ironic, but it’s not that different than the Aztecs’ slicing open chests — people are being sacrificed in the pursuit of self-satisfaction.”

The blood shed in Hernán Cortés’ brutal battles with the Aztecs and Christ’s blood shed for us on the cross also figure metaphorically into the title. The “rose” is, of course, the Blessed Virgin who brought our Savior into the world. The roses she bestowed on Juan Diego also come to mind here.

Today’s world needs to refocus on Christ and his Mother, Watkins says, and to do so we must follow the example of St. Juan Diego, who was described as childlike. “It’s written in the Good Book,” he observes, “that we need to have the faith of a child,” but as we grow older, this often becomes corrupted. “We need to return to that mindset of a child,” he says emphatically.

Juan Diego’s name in his native Nahuatl language translates as “messenger eagle,” and with that in mind, Watkins is hoping to encourage a new generation of “messenger eagles” to spread the Gospel message. “Juan Diego is someone we can all relate to,” says Watkins. “All of us have a calling to be a messenger eagle.” The unassuming saint simply attended Mass frequently during the week, prayed and spread devotion to God’s word, resulting in millions being converted. We too can do this.

Messenger Eagle Study Guides to accompany screenings of the film are available, for groups or for individuals, on www.thebloodandtherose.com, along with DVDs of the documentary. Together, the guides and DVD enable delving more deeply into the story of Our Lady of Guadalupe and facilitate answering the call to be a messenger eagle through spiritual reflection. “The goal of the spiritual event model,” says Watkins, “is to put people on fire with the Holy Spirit to go out and be those messenger eagles that we need to help our priests do their jobs.”

He is in the early stages of establishing a Messenger Eagle Foundation which will receive profits generated by the Catholic division of Renegade Productions, which includes media and marketing work done for dioceses around the country. “We’ve been able to take our secular creative talents,” he says, “and apply them in this area to help tell stories that will enrich fundraising efforts as well as hopefully re-spark people’s faith lives and put the thumbprint on why it is they are doing what they are doing.”

With years of experience in advertising and marketing, Watkins knows all the ins and outs of influencing people to like or purchase a product, and is thrilled to put those same skills to work in spreading the Gospel. The devil’s favorite marketing tool is “sublime marketing,” he notes, but the good news is we can use that same type of marketing for the church’s cause as well. “I’m not afraid of the devil so much as I am of standing in front of God when he says, ‘What did you do with your talents?’” he adds.

Filming for “The Blood & The Rose” involved going on location not only in Mexico, but in Spain, which Watkins explains is strongly tied to the story of Our Lady of Guadalupe.

The tale goes that a man name Gil Cordero in Spain’s Extremadura region beheld an apparition of the Virgin Mary who told him where to find a statue of her (purportedly carved by St. Luke) which had been buried near the Guadalupe River there to save it from destruction during the Moorish invasion. The river’s name came from the Arabic word for river and the Latin word for wolf.

Over the years a large church was built at this site and stands there today as the Shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe. Interestingly, Queen Isabella happened to be staying at this shrine when a young man named Christopher Columbus brought his papers to be signed by her for his voyage to the west, Watkins related, and Hernán Cortés, who figured so prominently in the Spanish conquest of Mexico, grew up nearby and prayed at the shrine.

In a third coincidence, a young priest who lived in the monastery there for a time, Father Juan de Zumárraga, later became the bishop who received Juan Diego and his tilma, whose miraculous nature and studies of it are also explored in the documentary.

In the week of the Feast Day of Our Lady of Guadalupe on Dec. 12, 20 to 25 screenings of “The Blood & The Rose” with reflection study were scheduled to take place around the country and Watkins is looking forward to many more.

“We think that our film, combined with the catechetical study guides that we’ve created for the film, can be a great one-two punch,” he says, “and can really help launch people into a great Ordinary Season of Catholicism that we go into, which will lead us then into a great season of advent and ready to greet Christ at Christmas when we come around next year for the Immaculate Conception and birth of Christ.”