Our Lady on Tepeyac Hill

Today, we celebrate the feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe. The story is fairly familiar. The Virgin Mary appeared to Juan Diego at the Hill of Tepeyac, and asked for a Church to be erected there in her honor. Juan Diego went to the Archbishop of Mexico City, a Franciscan named Juan de Zumarraga. Juan Diego told the Archbishop what he had seen, but was not believed. This repeated the next day. Juan Diego saw the Virgin Mary, went to the Archbishop, but this time, he asked for a miracle to confirm her identity. The following day, Juan Diego’s uncle became very ill, so he avoided the hill of Tepeyac as he went to get a priest to hear his uncle’s confession and give him last rites. The Virgin Mary appeared to him on his journey, and told him that he should have come to her with his prayers for his uncle, and that his uncle would be fine. She also gave a miracle to bring to the Bishop: flowers blooming in the middle of December on the hill of Tepeyac, Castilian roses, flowers that are not native to Mexico. Juan Diego went, and gathered the flowers in his tilma, and took them to the Bishop. When he opened his tilma, they revealed a miraculous image of Our Lady, depicted as a pregnant Indian woman. An image that remains miraculously preserved 491 years later in spite of unprotected display while being venerated with candles and incense for the first 200 or so of those years, an accidental spill of Nitric Oxide in 1791, and a bombing by a Mexican secularist in 1921, although some later additions made to the original image, have deteriorated over time. This miracle helped spur the rapid Christianization of Mexico, with a miraculously large number of baptisms among the various Native peoples over the years after the creation of the shrine to Our Lady.

After witnessing this miracle, Juan Diego returned to his uncle, who was now miraculously cured. He had also seen an image of the Virgin, in which she revealed that she wished to be known as Our Lady of Guadalupe. This name seems out of place: after all, the language that Juan Diego and his uncle spoke, Nahuatl, doesn’t have anything equivalent to the letters G or D, so what is this one Spanish word doing in the middle of these apparitions?

The Virgin is linking her apparition in Mexico to an earlier apparition that had taken place in Spain. It is another story in which Mary appears to a humble, ordinary man. In the 14th century, a couple hundred years before she appeared in Mexico, Our lady appeared to a shepherd named Gil Cordero, who was looking for a missing animal from his flock along the River Guadalupe. The Virgin appeared to him and told him to find some priests to dig at that location. They found a statue of Our Lady, one of three Black Madonnas in Spain. At the Monastery built on the location, the documents authorizing Christopher Columbus’ journey to the Americas was signed, and Columbus returned to that Monastery to thank God after his first voyage.

In Our Lady of Guadalupe, the Mexican version, we see the coming together of these two cultures: a former Native place of worship, and a miraculous image depicting Mary as an Indian woman, and a Spanish name with a link to a Spanish apparition of Our Lady. These different cultures, merged smoothly under a Catholic identity, are both fully present in the miracle. Our Lady of Guadalupe has been justly proclaimed, “Queen of Mexico,” “Patroness of the Americas,” “Empress of Latin America,” and “Protectress of Unborn Children.” This last title, given by St. John Paul II, is particularly relevant today as we look towards establishing legal protections for the lives of unborn children in the aftermath of the overturning of Roe v Wade.

Our Lady of Guadalupe, pray for us.