This is a particularly tough one for me, after all, earnest people find comfort in Our Lady of Guadalupe. Even the clergy in Mexico know this a third rail issue as Father Schulenberg could attest to. In the Philippines too, Our Lady of Perpetual Help has a very strong devotion, although the icon was stolen from the Church of Cyprus. If you are honest with yourself, you know the answer to the question of who painted the tilma in your heart of hearts.

But Andrew was a bit slow out of the gates, your fellow BeliefNet blogger Rod Dreher posted yesterday (Sunday)
http://blog.beliefnet.com/crunchycon/2009/03/hillary-clinton-vs-our-lady-of.html
and now has a healthy 115-comment-long thread debating the merits of intercession for Hillary and portents against the rest of us (Butte plane crash wipes out abortion-entrepreneur’s family in a graveyard dedicated to his victims, irony anyone?
Butte features one of the world’s largest statues of Mary
http://fwt.txdnl.com/5-10/j/u/jukeboxjilly/ourlady/overlook.jpg
perhaps the last thing the wee ones saw?
Holy Mary, Mother of God pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death,
Amen

Mariological claims aside, who really did paint it?

This isn’t too bad. The worst one was in the 1950s when President Eisenhower went to India and remarked on the gun towers around the Taj Mahal and it had to be explained to him that those were minarets.

Hilary is such a polarizing figure anyway that it makes reasoned discussion of this issue pretty much impossible (as the thread over on Rod’s blog proved). However, in all fairness, I have to point out that I teach RCIA and adult education in my parish, and there are an awful lot of cradle Catholics that don’t know the story of Guadalupe, or many other traditional stories of the saints (e.g. Francis and the wolf of Gubbio). My impression (anecdotal, admittedly) is that the generation that grew up after Vatican II was not exposed to the stories of the saints, the folktales, and the traditions (lower-case “t”) of Catholicism to the extent that their elders were.
Also, Hilary is Protestant, and once again, my on-the-ground experience here is that even intelligent, cultured non-Catholics are often astoundingly ignorant of even square-one Catholic doctrine, practice, etc. I have seen people who didn’t know what “Mass” or “Lent” mean. I’m sure Hilary knows more than that about Catholicism, but I wouldn’t be surprised to find that she (or most other non-Catholics) doesn’t know about La Guadalupana.

I’m staying out of this one.

I’m not sure why a Methodist should be au-courrant with Catholic mythology in the first place.
And will/can anyone answer Danny’s question above? Who DID paint it? (And, why is asking who painted it such a “controversy” anyway?) No one seems to have answered that question, either in the report or in the comments linked to it or in this thread? What gives?

Marcos Aquino, painted it originally. His initials, “M.A.” are present in an under layer of the present icon. The icon received a major reworking sometime around 1900.

It’s a non issue. What dumb things would I come out with if I visited a Shinto Shrine or a Synogogue?
Expecting a Protestant to be conversant with a Catholic tradition is like expecting me to be conversant with every detail in the Bhagavad Gita.

Alforo is right.
I hope that the ranters and ravers here are as familiar with Francis Asbury as they expect a Methodist to be with Mexican saints.
One person’s religious traditions are another’s non-relevant trivia.
Get over it, folks: not ALL of the world dotes on Catholic arcania.