It is hardly a coincidence that in 1945, the year that World War II ended, Pope Pius XII looked at the suffering, fragmented world and declared Our Lady of Guadalupe patroness of the Americas.
As noted by the Mexican episcopate and echoed by Blessed Pope John Paul II, the Guadalupe event “meant the beginning of evangelization with a vitality that surpassed all expectations. Christ’s message, through his Mother, took up the central elements of the indigenous culture, purified them, and gave them the definitive sense of salvation… Guadalupe and Juan Diego have a deep ecclesial and missionary meaning and are a model of perfectly inculturated evangelization,” said the pope in his homily for Juan Diego Cuauhtlatoatzin’s canonization on July 31, 2002.
“At the heart of the Guadalupana message has been a deep-seated marriage between Mary the Mother of the Church and, first, Hispanic Catholics in Hispanic America — and then beyond, especially to the United States, eventually drawing into this spiritual world Catholic people of a variety of ethnic heritages,” indicated history professor Dr. Patrick Foley, founder of the journal Catholic Southwest: A Journal of History and Culture. Foley is a noted Texas Catholic historian, and long-time member of Holy Trinity Mission in Azle, just northwest of Fort Worth.
“The essence of this Guadalupe cult,” added Foley, “has inspired the spread of evangelization among millions of Catholics for hundreds of years, particularly Hispanics, but so many others also. It is an embodiment of their Catholic faith, their ethnic heritage, and their culture, bringing together the three in the love of la Virgen de la Guadalupe.”
It is a simple and familiar story.
An Indian named "Cuauhtlatoatzin" or "the talking eagle,” was born in Cuautlitlán, (part of what’s now Mexico City) and later baptized Juan Diego. He was a gifted member of the Chichimeca people, one of the more culturally advanced groups living in the Anáhuac Valley.
One Saturday in December, Juan Diego walked past the hill of Tepeyac (the “Hill of the Nose” in Nahuatl, his native tongue) on his way to church, when he heard singing, then a voice calling him from the hilltop, “Juan, my little one, Juan Diego.”
When he reached the top of the hill, he saw a lady who asked him to approach. Juan Diego bowed before her. “I am,” said the Lady, “the Holy Mary, the eternal Virgin, Mother of the true God. I wish a shrine to be built here to show my love to you. I am your compassionate mother, yours, and all the dwellers of this earth. To bring to pass what I request, go and speak to the bishop of Mexico and say I sent you to make manifest to him my will.”
Our Lady appeared to Juan Diego three times, ultimately providing for a skeptical bishop proof of their encounter in the form of two signs: a cloak full of fresh roses in December, and a miraculous image of herself on Juan Diego’s tilma or shawl.
Traditionally set in 1531, the Guadalupe event took place just a few decades after Christopher Columbus arrived in the New World. While visions of Spanish conquistadores dominate the landscape of our imagination, the day-to-day culture of this altering world remained vastly Aztec, featuring a great diversity of dialects and norms. As the ethnicity of the population increasingly blended, so did the separation and rivalry among social classes.
Much of what we know of the culture of that era is a mix of personal narrative, tradition, archaeological theory, and iconographic sources. It is remarkable, then, that the first and oldest written document on the Guadalupe event dates back to 1556, "el Nican Mopohua" (written in the official language of the Aztec empire, Náhuatl).
But the story of Juan Diego’s encounter with Our Lady was initially transmitted only orally, recorded originally through Aztec pictographic chronicles called mapas, as well as through the beautiful detailed ballads chanted by elderly Indians to accompany the annual dance in the plaza of Guadalupe. This ballad told the story of the miracle of the roses and of Juan Diego’s tilma, in addition to the installation of the sacred image at the newly built shrine.
According to Guadalupan scholar Father Martinus Cawley, Guadalupan devotion among Spaniards born in or near the capital city spread swiftly beyond Mexico’s central valley in the mid-1550s.
Until the Guadalupe story was printed, noted Fr. Cawley, the first direct translator of Guadalupe from the original Náhuatl, “preachers and artists generally avoided public allusion to its individual episodes, but censorship was less strict for Indian dances at the shrine. As a result Spanish spectators could catch the gist of the story from the costumes and mimicry and from explanations by other onlookers. By 1600 this gist was so widely known that artists — though not preachers as yet — were discreetly depicting even the miracles of the roses and tilma,” explained the monk from the Trappist-Cistercian Abbey of Our Lady of Guadalupe outside of Fayetteville, Oregon.
Historians, scientists, and experts may forever argue about the veracity of specific details surrounding the Guadalupe story.
The problem, however, “evaporates,” said Fr. Cawley, “when one focuses on the lives of the most authentic devotees, especially those to be met in the earliest documents… Their blunders in setting a date or naming a prelate do not undermine their lived experience as pilgrims, nor the mystery of a Compassionate Providence that meets them.”
In 1666, 28-year-old Father Antonio de Gama went to Juan Diego’s hometown, Cuautitlán, to interview elderly witnesses of the Guadalupe story. This official Church inquiry became part of a petition sent to Rome to request liturgical honors for Guadalupe. Thanks to this 1666 inquiry, what have come to be known as the Eight Witnesses of Cuautitlán offer compelling examples of how the Guadalupe story was passed on, and more importantly, of the vibrancy of their faith and devotion to Our Lady. “They took great pride that Juan Diego was from their hometown,” noted Fr. Cawley. “These witnesses believed the reason that they lived so long was that Our Lady wanted them to testify, to pass on the message,” he said.
Perhaps the most remarkable of the witnesses, said Fr. Cawley, is the widow Juana de la Concepción, who offers details that no other interviewee mentions as she describes “la Aparición de la Virgen Santísima de Guadalupe” (the apparition of the Holy Virgin of Guadalupe). Juana documents her father’s collection of mapas or pictogram records, and “assures us that both her parents knew Juan Diego well, often visiting him in his later years in his hermitage at the shrine, where they got the Guadalupe story from his own mouth,” said Fr. Cawley.
As district governor, Pablo Xuárez noted when interviewed later that same day, “in his grandmother’s day, the story was so popular that even the toddlers were heard ‘reciting or chanting it,’” added Fr. Cawley. “I visualize little Juana on her father’s lap, singing along with him as he rehearses the ballad for the annual dance — since someone so deeply interested in local lore would surely be an apt candidate for chanting it at the shrine.”
According to Dr. Foley, it is hard to dispute the impact of Our Lady’s presence on the unfolding New World.
Quoting historian Francis Johnston, Foley emphasized that, “by the end of 1539 about eight million had embraced the Catholic faith as a direct result of the creation of the sacred image.” In the book, Our Lady of Guadalupe and the Conquest of Darkness, author Warren Carroll also noted that between 1532 and 1548, there occurred in Mexico nine million baptisms, most of them inspired by the reported apparitions of Our Lady of Guadalupe.
It is agreed by numerous Guadalupana scholars, Foley added, that, “the Virgin Mary’s beautiful facial expressions, reflecting the love of her Divine Son, and her appearance as an indigenous lady, greatly attracted the Aztecs and other indigenous people to the Catholic faith.”
In 1736, Guadalupe became the patroness of the City of Mexico, and ten years later, the patroness of the whole of “New Spain,” spreading devotion beyond Mexico. In 1810, the Creoles (Spaniards born in the New World) joined forces with the Indians and mestizos (people of Indian and Spanish blood), to start what would be an 11-year revolutionary war for independence. “Viva la Virgen de Guadalupe” was a common rallying cry for these pioneers.
“By the time of independence from old Spain” in 1821, explained Fr. Cawley, “[Guadalupe] was the main force to give all the provinces the sense of being one nation.”
Pius X declared Our Lady of Guadalupe patroness of all Latin American countries in 1910. In 1945, Pope Pius XII declared Guadalupe "Empress of the Americas.” And in 1960, John XXIII called Our Lady of Guadalupe the “celestial missionary of the New World” and “Mother of the Americas.”
Pope John Paul II became the first pope to visit the shrine in Mexico City in 1979, returning to Guadalupe in 1990 to proclaim Juan Diego “Blessed.” “On a recent visit to the Tepeyac shrine I glimpsed what seems the essence of the devotion,” Fr. Cawley observed. The figure was “an elderly couple sitting silent and motionless, his arm gently around her shoulder. They seemed to be one heart and one soul as they gazed across the plaza to Our Lady’s house, rejoicing in her loving presence throughout their lives.”
“The blessed mother has an interesting way of empowering the poor like Juan Diego,” noted Mark Zwick, founder and director of Casa Juan Diego Catholic Worker House in Houston. “You can’t speak that kind of empowerment. She chooses an indigenous person — and that’s revolutionary! She chooses to appear almost exclusively to those who wouldn’t have a respectable place in society.”
It’s very clear that we need Juan Diego’s charism, says Zwick, “his fidelity in responding to God’s calling even when it’s difficult. Juan Diego certainly resisted the lady, and he was not well received by the Church, but he stayed with it — and ultimately brought about the conversion of eight million people.”
Like Catholic Worker Movement founder Dorothy Day’s revolution, “Juan Diego’s non-violent revolution truly changed the face of Catholicism in the world,” Zwick concluded.
Maria Scaperlanda is a freelance writer in Norman, Oklahoma, and the author of several books, including “The Seeker’s Guide to Mary” and “The Journey: a Guide for the Modern Pilgrim.” See: www.mymaria.net.
Copyright © 2011 by North Texas Catholic
For more on Our Lady Guadalupe celebrations see: St. Patrick Cathedral hosts Our Lady of Guadalupe Celebrations
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