Our Lady of Guadalupe

The story is told in the Nican Mopohua, an account in Nahuatl. It sets the events early in December 1531, ten years after the conquest of the city of Mexico. In its telling Juan Diego, an indigenous commoner who lived at Cuauhtitlan, was walking to Tlatelolco before dawn on a Saturday when, at the hill of Tepeyac, he heard singing and was called by name. On the hilltop stood a lady whose clothing shone like the sun. She told him that she was the ever-virgin Mary, mother of the true God, that she wished a house to be built for her there, where she would hear the weeping of the people of that land and of all who called on her, and that he was to carry her wish to the bishop of Mexico (Nican Mopohua lines 1–39).

The bishop, the Franciscan Juan de Zumárraga, the account goes on, listened without belief and told him to come again; on a second visit he asked for a sign (Nican Mopohua lines 40–83). Juan Diego then stayed at home with his uncle Juan Bernardino, who was dying. When he set out to fetch a priest, the lady met him, told him that his uncle was already well, and sent him to the hilltop to cut flowers, which he found in bloom although it was the season of frost, and which he carried in his cloak to the bishop (Nican Mopohua lines 94–146). When he opened the cloak and the flowers fell to the floor, the account says, the image of the Virgin appeared on the cloth; the bishop knelt, asked pardon, and placed the cloak in his chapel (Nican Mopohua lines 181–193). The account ends with the building of a shrine at Tepeyac, and says that the bishop moved the image from his chapel to the principal church so that all could see it (Nican Mopohua lines 194–218).

The account as it stands was printed in Mexico City in 1649, in a book whose licences name Luis Laso de la Vega, chaplain of the shrine, as its author (Nican Mopohua title page of the printing of 1649, with the approbation and licence on the two leaves after it). That is 118 years after the date it gives. The historians named in the dating note, who examined the record, found no document of the 1530s that mentions the apparition. One of them, Joaquín García Icazbalceta, was asked by the archbishop of Mexico in 1883 for his judgment as a historian (García Icazbalceta, Letter on Guadalupe editor’s preface (Advertencia), p. 7). He noted that the defenders of the apparition themselves admit that no original record of an inquiry into it exists (García Icazbalceta, Letter on Guadalupe § 11), and wrote that the many surviving writings of Zumárraga contain no allusion to the event and never use the name Guadalupe (García Icazbalceta, Letter on Guadalupe § 12). He also summarized an inquiry of 1556 into a sermon in which the Franciscan provincial, Francisco de Bustamante, attacked what he called a new devotion at a chapel of Our Lady named Guadalupe and said that its image had been painted by an Indian, Marcos (García Icazbalceta, Letter on Guadalupe §§ 30–31). The Holy See holds that the Nahuatl account was written in 1556 by Antonio Valeriano (Holy See, Biography of Juan Diego paragraphs 1 and 3).

The Catholic Church has approved the devotion: John Paul II wrote in 1999 that the appearance of Mary to Juan Diego had a decisive effect on evangelization, recorded that she is invoked as “Patroness of all America”, and welcomed the bishops’ proposal that her feast be kept throughout the continent on 12 December (John Paul II, Ecclesia in America 11). On 31 July 2002, in the basilica at Tepeyac, which he called the Marian heart of Mexico and of America, he declared Juan Diego a saint (John Paul II, Homily at the canonization of Juan Diego 1, 3).