Our Lady of Guadalupe

In December 1531, on the hill of Tepeyac outside Mexico City, a native man named Juan Diego Cuauhtlatoatzin said he met a lady who spoke his language, Nahuatl, and asked for a church. The bishop, Juan de Zumárraga, asked for a sign. On December 12 Juan Diego returned with Castilian roses gathered from the winter hill, and when he opened the tilma the image of the lady was on the cloth. The traditional narrative is the Nican Mopohua, written in Nahuatl in the sixteenth century. Juan Diego was canonized by John Paul II in 2002. The Church receives the event as a true apparition. She does not claim that every later story told about the tilma has the same weight.

The image shows a woman clothed with the sun, standing on the moon, in the dress of a pregnant indigenous woman, with the black sash of maternity. She is Mary of Nazareth, not a fourth person of the Trinity and not a local goddess under a Christian name. The words attributed to her in the Nican Mopohua include the line millions of Catholics know: “Am I not here, I who am your mother?” She identifies herself as the ever-virgin Holy Mary, Mother of the true God, through whom one lives. The apparition came ten years after the conquest of Tenochtitlan, in a world of plague, violence, and collapsed meaning. The millions of baptisms that followed are part of the history the Church tells. So is the sin of the conquest. Guadalupe does not bless the sin. She stands inside the wreckage and points to her Son.

Pius XII called her patroness of the Americas. John Paul II repeated and widened that title. In the United States the day is a feast, raised on the national calendar, in white, with the Gloria. It is not a holy day of obligation. In Mexico it is kept with still greater solemnity, as the patronal feast of the nation. The universal Church does not ignore the day, but the rank a Catholic meets in the United States is feast, not solemnity. When December 12 falls on a Sunday of Advent, the Sunday usually prevails unless the local calendar provides the higher rank. Advent is not cancelled by roses.

The theology of the image is the theology of Mary already defined and about to be defined more sharply. She is the Virgin Mother. She is with child. She stands in the place of the woman of Revelation 12 without ceasing to be a particular woman who appeared to a particular poor man. Devotion that stops at the nation, the flag, or the controversy about the tilma’s fibers has not yet arrived at the petition she is said to have made: a house where her Son could be given to the people.

The Mass of Our Lady of Guadalupe uses Marian texts and, where the national lectionary provides them, readings of election and of the woman clothed with the sun. The Gospel of the visitation is especially fitting: Mary goes in haste to Elizabeth, and the child leaps. Tepeyac is that haste extended across an ocean. The collect asks that we who rejoice in her protection may seek more earnestly the good of souls.