A lady on the hill
On the Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception in 1531, an indigenous peasant made his way to Mass through the cold winter desert of southern Mexico. Years earlier, Cuauhtlatoatzin had been baptized by Spanish missionaries and taken the baptismal name Juan Diego. Wrapped in a thick cloak made of cactus fibers, Juan Diego now climbed the path up Tepeyac Hill, then stopped short at the top.
A beautiful woman stood alongside the road. She wore native Aztec dress, specifically the clothing of an Aztec princess, and her face had Aztec features.
"Cuauhtlatoatzin," she called in his native Nahuati language. "I am the woman clothed in the sun whom you have learned about from the priests. Tell the bishop I wish a shrine to be built here in my honor, to show God's love for all his children."
Both stunned and overjoyed, Juan Diego rushed to report the vision and Our Lady's request to Archbishop Zummárraga. The Spanish bishop hesitated. Juan Diego was a faithful man, but an apparition of Our Lady? Zummárraga needed time to pray and think.
Juan Diego returned to Our Lady and asked her to send someone more important and believable than a humble convert. She simply told Juan Diego to ask the bishop again, which he did. This time, the bishop asked for a sign. At the next apparition, Juan Diego informed Our Lady of the request. She instructed him to return the next day, and she would give one.
Roses in winter
But the next day, December 11, Juan Diego found his whole day occupied with trying to secure the sacraments for his dying uncle, and he missed his meeting with Our Lady. He felt ashamed (who stands up the Queen of Heaven?), so on December 12, as he rushed to bring a priest to his uncle, he took a different route. Our Lady found him anyway.
"Why did you not seek recourse from me for your uncle? Am I not here who am your mother?" she gently admonished him. She smiled: "Your uncle is cured. And it is time to bring the bishop his sign. Go and look on the top of Tepeyac—you will find roses growing there, even in the cold of winter."
Juan Diego rushed to find the roses, and there atop Tepeyac they bloomed: beautiful, lush roses that had burst forth from nothing—or, maybe more accurately, from Heaven. He gathered them up into his cloak and ran to the bishop's house, where he triumphantly unfurled his tilma so the roses spilled at Zummárraga's feet.
What happened next astounded everyone present that cold December day, and it has continued to astound millions for the almost 500 years since. Where the roses had been gathered in the tilma, an image appeared. A woman standing on the moon, draped in a veil of stars, wearing the colors and patterns of an Aztec queen. She stood before the rays of an Aztec sun deity, indicating her precedence, but she also bowed, indicating that she was not God herself. She was visibly pregnant.
Archbishop Zummárraga saw the miraculous image first. Juan Diego looked at the bishop and others falling to their knees in wonder, then looked down at his own cloak. The sign was not the roses: the sign was Our Lady herself.
Immediately the local Church began building the shrine she had requested. Juan Diego gave his miraculous tilma to the bishop for safekeeping. When he returned to his uncle's home, he found the dying man cured as Our Lady had promised. But another, more important healing occurred following the miracle at Guadalupe: over the next seven years, an estimated nine million converts received Baptism.
"Am I not here who am your mother?"
There are so many amazing facts about the Guadalupe event. The apparition itself. The Castilian roses that were a flower Juan Diego had never seen before, because they were not native to Mexico but to Spain, from where Archbishop Zummárraga and the other Franciscan missionaries had come. The healing of Juan Diego’s uncle. The miraculous tilma. (Go research the tilma: what has been since discovered about the image’s medium, the constellation pattern of her veil, and its inexplicable survival through various attacks. This video is a brief summary.)
But there is something more here. When she appeared to Cuauhtlatoatzin on that cold morning in 1531, Our Lady had the dark physical appearance and dress of an indigenous woman—not the fair skin of the European missionaries or their sacred icons. She spoke to him in the native Nahuati language—not in Spanish nor the high Latin of the Roman Church. She identified herself as “mother of the very true deity,” a formulation that had particular significance for the peasant people. And she told him, “Am I not here who am your mother?”—not their mother, not someone else’s mother, not the mother of another people from another place, but his own.
In Guadalupe she made it clear that Christ is for all, everywhere. That equal human dignity is for all, everywhere. No group may claim superiority over another. No faithful tradition may claim to possess the only, truest, or best expression of Catholic life. Our faith is and has always been pure grace and gift, not a prize or trophy. Faith is given to one so that it may be joyfully handed to another, like the Castilian roses whose beauty and fragrance filled the room and were equally shared by all present, from the archbishop to the holy, obedient peasant.
St John Paul II described Guadalupe as “the beginning of evangelization with a vitality that surpassed all expectations. Christ, through His mother, took up the central elements of the indigenous culture, purified them, and gave them the definitive sense of salvation... a model of perfectly inculturated evangelization.”
The feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe is December 12.
Our Lady and mother, come to help us today!
P.S. The original Nahuati handwritten testimony and record from Guadalupe is housed in the New York Public Library’s 5th Avenue branch. I'm not sure why it’s there instead of in Guadalupe, but make an effort to visit it if you’re in NYC.
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