Our Lady of Guadalupe

In December 1531, ten years after the fall of the Aztec capital, a man named Juan Diego was walking before dawn across Tepeyac hill, near what is now Mexico City. He was an Indigenous man who had recently become a Christian, and he was on his way to Mass. An account handed down for centuries, called the Nican Mopohua, says that he heard beautiful singing on the hill.

According to this account, a radiant woman spoke to him in his own language, Nahuatl, and called him by a loving name. She said she was Mary, the Virgin, the mother of the true God, and she asked that a church be built on that hill. She sent Juan Diego to tell the bishop, Juan de Zumárraga. The bishop listened kindly, but he did not yet believe, and he asked for a sign.

Meanwhile, Juan Diego’s uncle, Juan Bernardino, fell gravely ill. Worried, Juan Diego tried to take another road to find a priest. The account says that the Lady met him anyway and told him not to be afraid: his uncle would recover. Then she sent him up the hill to gather what he found there. In the cold of December, as the story tells it, he found roses. She arranged them in his tilma, his cloak, and told him to show them only to the bishop.

In the account, Juan Diego went back to the bishop and opened his tilma. The roses fell to the floor, and on the cloth appeared the image of the Lady. The bishop believed, and a chapel was built. That tilma is still kept in the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico City, and millions of people visit it. The Church has approved this devotion and celebrates the feast on 12 December, and in 2002 Pope John Paul II declared Juan Diego a saint. What the Church has always taught is that Jesus, from the cross, gave Mary to his disciples as their mother. In the account, this is how Our Lady comforted Juan Diego: