Our Lady of Guadalupe

The story of Guadalupe

In December 1531, ten years after the Spanish conquest of the Aztec capital, a widowed Indigenous convert named Juan Diego Cuauhtlatoatzin was walking to Mass across Tepeyac Hill, north of Mexico City. The fullest early account is the Nican Mopohua, written in Nahuatl, the Aztec language, and published in 1649. It tells the story this way.

The first apparition, December 9

Juan Diego heard birdsong and music on the hilltop and saw a young woman dressed like an Aztec princess, shining like the sun. She spoke to him in Nahuatl, called herself the ever-virgin Mary, Mother of the true God, and asked him to tell the bishop to build a church on that spot.

The bishop's doubts

Juan Diego went to Bishop Juan de Zumárraga, a Franciscan, who listened but was unconvinced. Juan Diego returned to the hill and begged the Lady to send someone more important. She told him that he was the one she had chosen. On a second visit, the bishop asked for a sign.

The sick uncle and the roses, December 12

Juan Diego's uncle, Juan Bernardino, fell gravely ill, and on December 12 Juan Diego took a different path around the hill to fetch a priest. The Lady met him anyway. In the line from the Nican Mopohua that is most often quoted, she asked him:

Am I not here, I who am your mother?

She assured him his uncle would recover and sent him to the hilltop, where he found Castilian roses blooming in the frost. She arranged them in his tilma, the cloak of woven cactus fiber that he wore.

The image on the tilma

When Juan Diego opened his tilma before the bishop, the roses spilled to the floor, and on the cloth was the image of the Virgin as he had seen her. The bishop knelt. That same day Juan Bernardino recovered and said the Lady had appeared to him too and told him her name: Santa María de Guadalupe.

The miracles of Guadalupe

• The image itself (traditional): Catholics regard the image on the tilma as miraculous. Ayate cloth, woven from agave fiber, is generally said to wear out within a few decades, yet the tilma has survived nearly five centuries.
• The healing of Juan Bernardino (traditional): reported in the Nican Mopohua as the sign that accompanied the image.
• The 1921 bombing (reported): On November 14, 1921, during the anti-Catholic persecution in Mexico, a man hid a bomb in flowers placed beneath the image. The blast damaged the altar and bent a brass crucifix, which is still displayed in the basilica, but the tilma and the people nearby were unharmed.
• Conversions: Within a decade of 1531, millions of Indigenous Mexicans had been baptized, and many historians link that growth to devotion to Guadalupe.

Scientists and historians have studied the image for centuries. Some studies report features they can't explain, and others argue that parts of it, such as the gold rays and the moon, were added or touched up by later artists. The Church doesn't require Catholics to believe in any particular apparition. It approved the devotion and, in 1754, Pope Benedict XIV approved the feast and its Mass.

What the image means

To the Aztec people of 1531, the image read like a message in their own visual language:

• Rays of the sun behind her: she is greater than the sun god they worshiped, yet she hides the sun rather than being it.
• The moon under her feet: she stands above the moon deity.
• The star-covered mantle: the stars of the heavens, and in Aztec art, the color of royalty.
• Folded hands and lowered eyes: she is not a god but prays to one.
• The black sash: worn by expectant mothers, showing that she carries a child.

Many Christians also see the image as the "woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet" of Revelation 12:1.

The Basilica of Guadalupe

Bishop Zumárraga built the first small chapel at Tepeyac within weeks. Larger churches followed, and the tilma now hangs in the modern Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe, opened in 1976 beside the old basilica. Millions of pilgrims visit each year, and the largest crowds arrive in the days around December 12, many walking the last stretch on their knees.

Patroness of the Americas

• 1754: Pope Benedict XIV named her patroness of New Spain and approved her feast.
• 1910: Pope Pius X named her patroness of Latin America.
• 1945: Pope Pius XII called her Queen of Mexico and Empress of the Americas.
• 1999: Pope John Paul II made December 12 a feast for the whole of the Americas.

How Our Lady of Guadalupe is honored

• Feast day: December 12, preceded in many Mexican and Mexican-American parishes by a novena beginning December 3.
• Las Mañanitas: a dawn serenade sung to the Virgin on the morning of December 12.
• Juan Diego's feast: December 9.

Praying to Our Lady of Guadalupe

Catholics honor Mary as the mother of Jesus and ask for her intercession; they don't worship her. Many pray the Rosary or a nine-day novena before the feast, and many simply repeat her words to Juan Diego, "Am I not here, I who am your mother?", as a prayer of trust in hard times.