Feast: December 9
The Indigenous man Our Lady of Guadalupe sent to the bishop: his four days at Tepeyac, what historians can and cannot show, and a prayer for December 9.
St. Juan Diego Cuauhtlatoatzin was an Indigenous layman in Mexico who, by the Church’s tradition, saw Our Lady of Guadalupe on Tepeyac Hill in December 1531, and in 2002 he became the first Indigenous saint of the Americas. His feast is December 9, which in 2026 is a Wednesday of Advent, three days before hers.
Lord God, you chose Juan Diego,
a poor man of Mexico’s native peoples,
to carry Our Lady’s message to the bishop.
When no one believed him, he went back.
When his uncle lay sick, he stayed by his side.
Give me his humble and faithful heart.
When I feel too small for what you ask, send me anyway.
Bless the Indigenous peoples of the Americas,
and every family living far from home.
With Mary of Guadalupe, lead us all to your Son.
St. Juan Diego, pray for us.
Amen.
“I confess to thee, O Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because thou hast hid these things from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed them to the little ones.”
Go deeper
Juan Diego was born, by tradition in 1474, at Cuauhtitlán, a town in the Valley of Mexico north of the great island city of Tenochtitlan. His own name was Cuauhtlatoatzin, which the Vatican’s biography renders as “the talking eagle.” He spoke Nahuatl, held no office and lived as one of the common people, and in the story he calls himself a man of no account.
The Twelve, the first large band of Franciscan missionaries, reached Mexico in 1524, three years after Tenochtitlan fell to Cortés. Juan Diego was already a grown man with a household when he asked for baptism, and María Lucía, his wife, was baptized at his side. She died in 1529. In those years he often made the long walk to Tlatelolco, where the friars said Mass and taught the faith.
On one of those walks, before dawn on Saturday, December 9, 1531, the Church’s tradition says that the Virgin Mary met him on the hill of Tepeyac, addressed him in Nahuatl, the language of his home, and gave him a message for the bishop: she wanted a church built there. Over four days the bishop doubted, Juan Diego’s uncle nearly died, and the story ended with roses in winter and her image on his cloak. The section below tells it day by day.
What came after is less famous and just as telling. With the bishop’s leave, Juan Diego gave up his house and land and moved into a poor hut beside the first little chapel at Tepeyac. Until he died he swept it, looked after the image, received the pilgrims who began to come, and spent long hours in prayer. The Vatican’s biography says he received Communion three times a week, and that people of his time held him in such esteem that they wished their own children would grow up like Juan Diego.
He died in 1548, already known as a holy man, and was buried at the chapel where he had served. More than four centuries later, the Church declared him a saint.
Three things in his story are worth carrying out of December.
The first is that he went back. The bishop doubted him, Juan Diego asked to be replaced by someone more important, and he was sent again. Most of us know what it is to be the person nobody listens to. St. Paul saw long ago that God likes to work this way: “But the foolish things of the world hath God chosen, that he may confound the wise; and the weak things of the world hath God chosen, that he may confound the strong” (1 Corinthians 1:27).
The second is the morning he went the long way around. His uncle was dying, and he took the other path around the hill so that no one would delay him. She met him on that path anyway, and there was no reproach in what she said. Love for a sick relative and love for God were not rivals that morning, and they are not rivals in a family now.
The third is that he stayed who he was. St. John Paul II, canonizing him, praised him for welcoming the Gospel without ceasing to be Indigenous. Our Lady came to him speaking his language and wearing the clothes of his own people. Faith did not ask Juan Diego to become a Spaniard. It asks no one to stop being who God made them.
This prayer was written for this page. It asks God for the gifts Juan Diego is remembered for, and asks Juan Diego to pray with us. Pray it on his feast, December 9, on any day of the Guadalupe novena, or on a day when you feel overlooked or are not believed.
With a family, one person can read each line and the rest can join in on the last two. Small children can learn just one line: St. Juan Diego, pray for us. Older ones can be asked to name one person they will visit or call this week, the way he stayed with his uncle.
No single novena to St. Juan Diego is kept everywhere. Many families pray the Guadalupe novena from December 3 to 11, and its seventh day falls on his memorial; on that day, add the prayer on this page after the novena prayer.
If you would rather pray nine days with him, pray this page’s prayer each day from December 1 to December 9, ending on his feast. A missed day can simply be made up the next day; there is no need to begin again.
The fullest telling is the Nican Mopohua (“Here it is told”), an account in Nahuatl first printed in 1649. What follows is our own short retelling of it, as the Church’s tradition and the Vatican’s biography of the saint pass it on.
The cloak hangs today in the basilica at the foot of Tepeyac. For the image itself, her feast on December 12 and what the Church has and has not said about the tilma, see the page on Our Lady of Guadalupe.
It is the question many people ask after hearing his story, and believers need not be afraid of it. Here is what historians agree on, what they still argue about, and what the Church has said.
What no one disputes. By the 1550s a chapel of Our Lady of Guadalupe stood at Tepeyac and drew large crowds. In 1556 a Franciscan preacher attacked the devotion from the pulpit, and Archbishop Alonso de Montúfar, who favored it, opened an inquiry. From then on the devotion grew without a break.
What is missing. No document securely dated to Juan Diego’s own lifetime names him. Bishop Zumárraga, at the center of the story, mentions neither the apparitions nor the image in any of his surviving writings. The first full accounts came more than a century later. A Mexico City priest, Father Sánchez, published one in Spanish in 1648, and Luis Laso de la Vega, the vicar of the shrine, published the Nahuatl Nican Mopohua the next year. Who wrote it is disputed. Some historians date it to the first half of the 1600s, perhaps from Laso de la Vega’s own pen. Many others, critics as well as defenders of the apparitions, place it in the 1500s and credit Antonio Valeriano, a Nahua scholar of that century, and the Vatican’s biography dates his text to 1556. The documents alone cannot yet decide it. In 1666 Church officials took sworn statements in Cuauhtitlán from elderly Indigenous witnesses, who repeated what older relatives had told them about Juan Diego and his holy life.
The quarrel of the 1990s. In 1996 Guillermo Schulenburg, abbot of the basilica since 1963, was quoted from an earlier interview with a Mexican Catholic magazine in which he had called Juan Diego a symbol rather than a real, historical person. The uproar ended with his resignation that same year, and he later joined other priests in a private letter to the Vatican arguing that Juan Diego’s existence had never been shown. In 1995 a small painted deerskin had come to light, now called the Codex Escalada after the Jesuit scholar who published it. It shows the apparition, names Cuauhtlatoatzin, and carries the date 1548, the year of his death. Laboratory tests in Mexico found its materials consistent with the sixteenth century, and a leading expert on the friar Bernardino de Sahagún, working from a copy, judged the signature on it to be his. Other scholars believe parts of it were added later, and some call it a forgery.
What the Church did. The Congregation for the Causes of Saints asked a commission of historians, led by the Church historian Fidel González Fernández, to look at the evidence again. On October 28, 1998, it reported that the documents and the long oral tradition were enough to show that Juan Diego had lived. Critics, among them the American historian and priest Stafford Poole, were not persuaded, and scholars still debate it. The Church canonized him in 2002.
A canonization declares that a person lived a holy life, is with God, and may be honored by the whole Church. It is not a ruling on every detail of an account first written down a century later. Apparitions belong to what the Church calls private revelation. Even those it has recognized stand outside the deposit of faith, so no Catholic is bound to accept one; yet such a gift can help believers live the Gospel more fully in their own time (Catechism, no. 67). And the Church has embraced this one for nearly five hundred years. It keeps the feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe across the Americas, and it has raised the man who carried her message to the altars. What it asks us to believe about Juan Diego is simple: God chose a humble man, and he now prays for us.
Juan Diego’s cause took the route the Church uses for saints venerated since time immemorial. On April 9, 1990, a decree in Rome recognized both his holy life and the devotion people had shown him for centuries, and on May 6 St. John Paul II declared him Blessed in the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe. In his homily the Pope held him up to the Indigenous peoples as their protector and advocate.
A canonization needs a miracle. The one the Church accepted happened in Mexico City in May 1990, in the very days of the beatification: a young man fell about thirty feet and struck his head, his mother begged Juan Diego to pray for him, and within a few days he had recovered completely. After medical and theological review, the decree recognizing the miracle was read before the Pope on December 20, 2001.
John Paul II canonized him in the same basilica on July 31, 2002, giving thanks to God for “the first indigenous Saint of the American Continent.” He praised a man who accepted Christ without setting aside who he was, and he asked Mexicans to stand with their Indigenous peoples in their rightful hopes.
The Church keeps his day on December 9, the day of the first apparition. The Roman Martyrology, the Church’s official register of the saints day by day, remembers him then as a man of the native peoples, of the purest faith, whose humility and fervor brought about the shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe on Tepeyac, where she appeared to him and where he died.
In 2026, December 9 is a Wednesday in Advent’s second week. On the liturgical calendar of the U.S. bishops it appears as an Advent weekday with an optional memorial of St. Juan Diego Cuauhtlatoatzin, so a parish may celebrate either his Mass or the Mass of the weekday. That day’s Gospel (Matthew 11:28–30) fits him well: “Come to me, all you that labour, and are burdened, and I will refresh you” (Matthew 11:28).
His day falls between two great feasts of Mary. Tuesday, December 8, is the Immaculate Conception, a holy day of obligation in the United States, and Saturday, December 12, is the feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe. If you are praying the Our Lady of Guadalupe novena, from December 3 to 11, his memorial is its seventh day.
For more on the season that holds his feast, see the season of Advent.
His feast opens the last three days before Our Lady of Guadalupe, and a family can walk them with him:
Lord Jesus, your Mother came to Juan Diego
and called him by name.
Call each of us by name.
When we are tired of trying, help us go back.
When someone we love is sick, keep us beside them.
And on the morning of your Mother’s feast,
let us bring you our small flowers through her hands.
St. Juan Diego, pray for us.
Amen.
To keep praying through the season, there are Advent prayers for every day, and for the virtue he is remembered for, the Litany of Humility.
He is invoked above all for the Indigenous peoples of the Americas. At the 1990 beatification John Paul II named him their protector and advocate.
In the United States many also ask his prayers for migrants and for families separated by borders, and the U.S. bishops publish a prayer to him for them. Lay people can claim him too. He was a husband, a widower and a working man, never a priest or a friar, and he became a saint living the ordinary life of a layman.
Yes. St. John Paul II canonized him on July 31, 2002, in the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico City, twelve years after beatifying him in the same place. He was the first Indigenous saint of the Americas.
December 9, the day of the first apparition at Tepeyac in 1531. In 2026 that is a Wednesday in Advent’s second week, and the U.S. calendar lists an optional memorial for him. The feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe follows three days later, on December 12.
The Church holds that he was, and canonized him in 2002 after a commission of historians reviewed the evidence in 1998. No document securely dated to his own lifetime names him, and the first full accounts were printed in 1648 and 1649, so some historians still doubt that he existed. The holy life the Church honors does not depend on every detail of the later story.
In the Nahuatl account she called him by a tender name, told him she was the ever-virgin Mary, Mother of the true God, and asked for a church on Tepeyac. When he was frightened for his dying uncle, she told him not to be troubled, reminded him that she was his mother and was there with him, and said that his uncle was already well.
Yes. In the account she addresses him in Nahuatl, the language he grew up speaking, and her image shows her dressed as a woman of his people. Pope Francis made this the heart of a 2023 talk on Juan Diego: the Gospel is best passed on in the language a person learned at home.
Strictly speaking, no. “Aztec” usually means the Mexica of Tenochtitlan, and he came from another town. But he was an Indigenous man of the Valley of Mexico who spoke Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs, and he was born, by tradition in 1474, in a town under Aztec rule. The Vatican’s biography counts him among the Chichimeca people.
No source records the cause. He died in 1548, after some seventeen years of living beside the chapel at Tepeyac, and was buried there. The Vatican’s biography says only that he died with a firm reputation for holiness.
His tilma, the plain cloak in which he carried the roses. Artists show him holding it open, either full of flowers or already bearing the image of Our Lady of Guadalupe.
By the Church’s tradition, Our Lady of Guadalupe chose him, a poor Indigenous convert, to carry her request to the bishop, and the shrine that grew from it at Tepeyac still draws pilgrims from all over the world. As the first Indigenous saint of the Americas, he also shows that the Gospel can be welcomed in every language and culture.
