Mexico City, Mexico · Tepeyac Hill · 1531
On a winter morning in 1531, ten years after the Spanish conquest, a poor indigenous man named Juan Diego was crossing Tepeyac Hill on his way to Mass. A young woman of his own people’s features appeared to him in a flood of light and called him by name. She asked that a church be built on that hill, where she could comfort her children. Five hundred years later, more pilgrims come to her than to any other Marian shrine on earth.
The Apparitions
Juan Diego saw the Lady four times between December 9 and December 12, 1531. She spoke to him in his native Nahuatl. She called herself “the Mother of the True God for whom we live,” and asked him to bring her message to the bishop, Juan de Zumárraga.
The bishop required a sign. The Lady sent Juan Diego to gather Castilian roses on the frozen hilltop, where no flowers should have been growing in December. She arranged the roses herself in his tilma — the rough woven cloak he wore. When Juan Diego opened the cloak before the bishop, the roses fell to the floor and the image of the Lady was revealed, painted upon the tilma in pigments no chemist has ever fully explained.
The image still hangs above the high altar of the Basilica of Guadalupe in Mexico City. The cloak — woven from a coarse cactus fiber that should have decayed within thirty years — is now nearly five centuries old. The eyes of the Lady, examined under microscope, contain a tiny image of a kneeling man. Pope Saint John Paul II, who canonized Juan Diego in 2002, called Our Lady of Guadalupe “the Mother of all Americas.”
The Sanctuary Today
The original Basilica, the New Basilica built in 1976, the chapels at the well, and the chapel on the hilltop together make up one of the largest pilgrimage sites in the world. Some twenty million people come every year — many on their knees across the great plaza. On December 12, the feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe, the basilica overflows.
The image is honored as the patroness of Mexico, of the Americas, of the unborn, and of the marginalized — the Lady who came to a poor man and spoke his language, the Mother who first appeared not in a great cathedral, but on a barren hillside to one of the least of her children.
A Prayer at Guadalupe
Holy Mary of Guadalupe,
Mother of the True God for whom we live,
Mother of every people on this side of the sea —
you came to a poor man and called him by name.
Call us by name today.
Carry to your Son the prayers of every wounded child of the Americas:
the migrant on the road, the mother at the bedside,
the one who feels invisible.
Wrap us in the mantle of your love.
Amen.
Live from Guadalupe
The Insigne y Nacional Basílica de Santa María de Guadalupe broadcasts the Holy Mass and the Rosary daily from before the very tilma of Juan Diego. The faithful of every continent join the prayer.
Visit & Learn More
- Basílica de Guadalupe (official): virgendeguadalupe.org.mx
- Wikipedia: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Our_Lady_of_Guadalupe
Journey with Mary: A Path to Jesus 