Our Lady of Guadalupe

The account, as the Catholic Encyclopedia summarises it and as the Vatican’s biography of St. Juan Diego tells it, runs over four days.

• Saturday, December 9. Juan Diego, a convert of about fifty-five on his way to morning Mass, meets a young woman on Tepeyac Hill who speaks to him in Nahuatl, his own language. She asks him to go to the bishop, Juan de Zumárraga, and ask for a church to be built there. The bishop hears him out and does not believe him.
• Sunday, December 10. He goes back to her, tells her to send someone of more standing, and is sent again. This time the bishop asks for a sign.
• Monday, December 11. Juan Diego does not return. His uncle, Juan Bernardino, is dying of fever, and he spends the day nursing him.
• Tuesday, December 12. Going for a priest before dawn, he takes the long way round the hill so as not to be delayed. She meets him on the road anyway, tells him his uncle is already healed, and sends him to the hilltop, where he finds roses blooming in December, though it was neither the time nor the place for them. She arranges them in his tilma. In front of the bishop he opens it, the roses fall, and the image is on the cloth. The uncle, healed that same hour, says she gave her name as Holy Mary of Guadalupe.

The fullest early telling is the Nican Mopohua (“Here is told”), a Nahuatl account printed in 1649 by Luis Laso de la Vega and traditionally attributed to Antonio Valeriano, a Nahua scholar of the sixteenth century; the Vatican’s biography of Juan Diego dates Valeriano’s text to about 1556, while many historians think the 1649 editor wrote it himself. Either way, it is the text that gives Our Lady’s best-loved words to Juan Diego, which Pope Francis has quoted in his December 12 homilies: “Am I not here, who am your Mother?”

Because, in the account, that is the name she gave: “Holy Mary of Guadalupe”. Guadalupe was already a famous Marian shrine in Extremadura, in Spain, and the Spanish would have recognised it at once. In 1675 the writer Luis Becerra Tanco proposed that she had used a Nahuatl word that Spanish ears heard as “Guadalupe”; other historians point out that no one in the first century and a half suggested any such thing, and take the Spanish name as original. Nobody has settled it, and nothing hangs on it.

There is no separate person here. Our Lady of Guadalupe is Mary, the mother of Jesus, under the title of the place where she made herself known, exactly as Our Lady of Lourdes and Our Lady of Fatima are. Catholics do not worship her; they ask her prayers, as they would ask anyone’s, and she points past herself to her Son. The words her Son’s mother says at Cana are the whole of her message in every apparition the Church has approved: “Whatever he says to you, do it” (John 2:5).

Juan Diego Cuauhtlatoatzin (the name means “the talking eagle”) was born in 1474 among the Chichimeca people of the valley of Mexico and was baptised at about fifty by one of the first Franciscan missionaries. After the apparitions, with the bishop’s permission, he lived the rest of his life as a hermit in a small hut beside the chapel where the image was kept, looking after it and the first pilgrims, until his death in 1548. John Paul II beatified him in Mexico City on May 6, 1990, and canonised him in the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe on July 31, 2002, calling him the first indigenous saint of the American continent. His memorial is December 9, the anniversary of the first apparition.

What the story keeps returning to is how small he thought he was. He asks her twice to send someone important instead. She does not. It is the pattern Scripture knows well: “God chose the lowly things of the world, and the things that are despised” (1 Corinthians 1:28).

The cloak itself hangs in the basilica in Mexico City. Almost everything written about it online mixes three kinds of claim, and it is worth keeping them apart.

Documented. On November 14, 1921, at a time of open hostility between the Mexican government and the Church, a man named Luciano Pérez Carpio placed a bomb in flowers at the foot of the image. The Knights of Columbus, citing the historian Eduardo Chávez, record that the blast was heard a kilometre away and bent the bronze candlesticks and the altar crucifix, which is still on display, while the image was unharmed. The fibre is agave, from the ixtle plant, not the maguey usually named.

Studied, with mixed results. In 1979 the American scientist Philip Callahan photographed the image in infrared. He reported no underdrawing or sizing beneath the face, hands, robe and mantle, which he could not explain, and he also found that other elements (the gold rays, the moon, the angel at her feet, the stars and gold trim) were added or retouched later by human hands. Both halves of that finding matter, and devotional pages usually quote only the first.

It is said. That the tilma keeps a constant temperature of 98.6 degrees (the Knights of Columbus, who defend the image, say plainly that this “has never been proven”); that a doctor heard a heartbeat under the sash (they call that false); that tiny figures are reflected in her eyes; that the stars on her mantle match the sky over Mexico on December 12, 1531; that the cloth should have rotted within decades. None of these has been published in a peer-reviewed study. They may be repeated with a smile, as things people say, but not as facts.

The Church has never pronounced on how the image was made, and faith in the apparition does not rest on any of it. What the Church has done is honour the devotion and canonise the man.

Whatever its origin, the image is full of meaning that the people of Mexico could read at a glance, and that Christians can read with the Book of Revelation: “A great sign was seen in heaven: a woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars” (Revelation 12:1).

• She stands in front of the sun and on the moon: greater than the powers the old religion worshipped, but not a goddess herself. Her hands are joined and her head is bowed, in prayer to someone greater.
• The dark sash at her waist, the Vatican’s biography of Juan Diego says, “signifies that she is pregnant”: Christ about to be born among the peoples of the New World. The Knights of Columbus note the Spanish wordplay: a ribbon is cinta, and pregnant is encinta. That is why she is so often invoked for mothers and the unborn.
• Her face and dress are those of “a woman with native features and dress”, in the same text’s words, not a European Madonna.
• The stars on her mantle and the angel beneath her feet complete the picture of a heavenly queen carried to the people she has come to.

Popes have honoured Our Lady of Guadalupe under several titles, and the history of who declared what is tangled; the sources disagree about some of the dates. What is certain: at her canonical coronation in 1895 the crowd hailed her as “Empress of America”, a title Pius XII took up in his radio message to Mexico in 1945; and in 1999, in the apostolic exhortation Ecclesia in America, John Paul II invoked her as “Patroness of all America and Star of the first and new evangelization” and accepted the bishops’ proposal that her feast be kept on December 12 throughout the continent.

In the United States December 12 is a feast in the liturgical calendar, not a holy day of obligation. In Mexico it is a solemnity and a holy day, kept even when it falls on a Sunday of Advent. The night before, parishes with Mexican roots sing Las Mañanitas to her before dawn, and it is often the fullest church of the year. Four days earlier comes the Immaculate Conception on December 8, a holy day of obligation in the United States.

Honest devotion can face the questions historians ask, and there are real ones. Bishop Zumárraga, the one man who should have written about the tilma, never mentions Juan Diego or the image in the writings that survive. In 1556 a Franciscan, Francisco de Bustamante, preached that the image had been painted by an indigenous artist, and Archbishop Montúfar, who favoured the devotion, opened an inquiry. The first detailed written accounts come more than a century after the events. In 1996 the abbot of the basilica, Guillermo Schulenburg, resigned after an interview in which he doubted Juan Diego had existed.

The Church knew these objections, which were argued in public in the 1990s, when it canonised Juan Diego in 2002, and it went ahead. A Catholic is not obliged to believe in any private revelation, even an approved one; the Church’s approval means the devotion is safe and good, not that it is part of the faith. What no historian disputes is what followed: a devotion that shaped a continent and still fills the basilica at Tepeyac.

The best known is St. John Paul II’s prayer from his first visit to Mexico in January 1979, which begins “O Immaculate Virgin, Mother of the true God and Mother of the Church!” AngelGuard gives it in full as the daily prayer of the Our Lady of Guadalupe novena, December 3 to 11. For the moments in between, these shorter prayers are our own; each asks Mary’s prayers and looks to her Son: