Our Lady of Guadalupe

Hardly a decade had passed since the Spanish conquest. In those few years, so much had changed for the native people: customs, institutions, even the words they used to speak of ordinary tasks.

In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Mexico City had suffered conquest twice. First the Aztecs had come and imposed their regime of human sacrifice, harvesting victims from the local people. The ritual offering involved the removal of the victim's heart while it was still beating. By the Aztecs' own accounting, their snake-god Quetzalcoatl demanded a quarter-million human lives every year.

The second conquest came in 1519 with the Spaniards, who bore deadly armaments and new diseases. These conquistadores forbade human sacrifice and tore down the Aztec temples. But the local people showed no interest in the religion of the Spaniards.

Among the few Christian converts of that first generation was a native man named Juan Diego. In 1531 he was considered old, in his fifties at a time when life expectancy was around forty.

One day Juan Diego was hurrying from his home in the hills to Mass in the city. Along the way he was surprised to encounter the Blessed Virgin Mary. She told him to go to the bishop and ask that a chapel be built in her honor, for the sake of the native people who needed her.

Juan Diego complied. The bishop was polite, but aloof and seemingly skeptical, deferring discussion to another day.

On his way home Juan Diego saw the Virgin again and told her of his failure, suggesting she should find someone with more prestige. But she insisted that the mission was his.

When he returned to the city the following day, the bishop was more receptive, but told Juan Diego to ask the lady for a sign.

Suddenly the mission had become time-consuming, and Juan Diego was already busy. He was the primary caregiver for his ailing uncle. When he arrived home after the second apparition, he found that his uncle’s health was declining. Juan Diego needed to fetch a priest in a hurry.

So he set out again for the city, but by a different route, in order to avoid any delay with the Blessed Virgin.

But he found her waiting on the alternate route. She assured him that his uncle had already been healed, and she told him to gather flowers for the bishop. It was winter — but Juan Diego looked around and saw roses growing! He gathered them into his overcoat, his tilma, and he hurried on. When he presented the roses to the bishop, they saw that the tilma now bore a miraculous image of the Virgin.

Word of the miracle spread, and conversions came. The Protestant Reformation had led millions away from true devotion. But the Guadalupe miracle more than restored their numbers.

Juan Diego’s overcoat was made of cactus fiber, which typically decays after five years. But it’s lasted half a millennium now and draws more than twenty million pilgrims every year.