Our Lady of Guadalupe

Feast Day: December 12

The feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe, celebrated on December 12th, honours the Blessed Virgin Mary as she appeared to the indigenous convert Juan Diego on the hill of Tepeyac near Mexico City in December 1531. This apparition and the miraculous image left on Juan Diego's cloak are among the most thoroughly documented and most theologically significant events in the history of Marian apparitions, and Our Lady of Guadalupe has become the most important religious image in the Americas and one of the most visited Marian shrines in the world.

The image on Juan Diego's tilma, which no artist of the sixteenth century could have produced, depicts a young woman of mestiza or indigenous appearance, standing on a crescent moon supported by an angel, clothed in a rose-coloured garment and a blue-green mantle covered with stars, her hands folded in prayer, with a black ribbon around her waist signifying in Aztec culture that she is with child. She is surrounded by golden rays of light. The iconographic elements of the image are a synthesis of Spanish Marian iconography and Aztec religious symbols, perfectly crafted to communicate the Gospel to an indigenous audience.

The theological and evangelistic significance of the image cannot be overstated. Within ten years of the apparitions, eight million indigenous Mexicans embraced Christianity, a mass conversion unprecedented in the history of Christian mission, attributed by contemporaries and by subsequent historians to the power of the image and the circumstances of its origin. The Aztec people, who had long sacrificed human beings to their gods, encountered in the image a goddess-like woman who herself bore a child and who brought a message not of death but of life.

Our Lady of Guadalupe was declared patroness of Mexico in 1746 and of all the Americas by Pope Pius XII in 1945. John Paul II extended her feast to the universal Church in 1999. Her basilica in Mexico City draws more than twenty million pilgrims each year, making it the most visited Catholic shrine in the world.