How Juan Diego’s roses blossomed into a global devotion

by Joe Bollig
joe.bollig@theleaven.org

KANSAS CITY, Kan. — The Hill of Tepeyac, now in a sprawling suburb of modern Mexico City, was an unremarkable place on the periphery of the colonial capital 500 years ago.

It had been a ceremonial hill where various Aztec deities were honored, but that ceased after the Spanish conquest between 1517 and 1521.

The years following the conquest were disastrous for the Native peoples: the humiliation of conquest, the destruction of culture and society, slavery, disease and death. Native population levels plummeted.

The Aztec peoples lived in despair. What could inspire them and give them hope?

On Dec. 9, 1531, something remarkable happened on that unremarkable Hill of Tepeyac.

A Native man, who had converted to Catholicism and taken the name Juan Diego, was passing by the hill on his way to a Franciscan mission when he suddenly encountered the vision of a beautiful woman.

She spoke to him in Nahuatl, Juan’s native language, and revealed herself to be the Blessed Virgin Mary. She became known as Our Lady of Guadalupe.

There were more apparitions and miracles to come after that first encounter. And nothing would ever be the same for Juan Diego, the peoples of Mexico and the world.

Destruction and evangelization

Catholic missionaries came to the conquered land of Mexico with a certain idea of evangelization, said Father Ramiro Sanchez Chan, CS, archdiocesan director of Hispanic ministry. They called it “tabula rasa,” or “clean slate.”

“They had the idea that now we have the Catholic faith, there is no more of the gods or divine images of the Aztecs,” he said. “When they applied this model of evangelization, they removed everything that was important for the Aztecs.”

But then Our Lady of Guadalupe arrived. She didn’t appear to the Spanish authorities or the missionaries, but to Juan Diego — a low-status Native. She appeared to him speaking a native language as a Native woman — a Morenita. She spoke to him with tenderness and love.

“She appears and says, ‘I am the Mother of God,’ in a very different way  [from] the image [the Spanish had],” said Father Ramiro. “She looked like one of them. She said to Juan Diego, ‘My son, my little one.”’

Instead of the image of the Virgin Mary according to the conqueror, she brought the image of the Virgin Mary as the loving Native mother.

“[Her message was] ‘I just want to be among you.’ . . . She presented the Mother of God in a way they could understand,” said Father Ramiro.

Our Lady of Guadalupe is the only Marian apparition tradition that has a centuries-long, ongoing and developed theological tradition, said professor Timothy Matovina, chairman of the theology department at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana.

“The first book about Guadalupe was written in 1648 by a Mexico City priest,” he said. “There was another written the following year in Nahuatl, the language of the Natives, like a pastoral manual about evangelizing Native peoples through Our Lady of Guadalupe.”

Interestingly, a lot of these theological texts are not about dogmatic matters, but about Our Lady of Guadalupe as an evangelizer.

But evangelization of the Native peoples didn’t happen quickly. The 16th century in Mexico was more an era of death than evangelization.

At first, Our Lady of Guadalupe was a local devotion. There were no parishes, monasteries or shrines dedicated to her name until more than a century after the apparitions.

“The first major church dedicated to her outside of the Valley of Mexico was in 1654, so it spreads slowly,” said Matovina. “But over time, Our Lady of Guadalupe became the national symbol of Mexico.

“She spread to the United States with Mexicans, to places like Topeka. That devotion there springs up during the time of the Mexican Revolution when the workers came to work on the rail lines. And now, Guadalupe is thoroughly international.”

Understanding Guadalupe

How are we supposed to approach the story of Our Lady of Guadalupe? It’s simple, according to Hosffman Ospino, a professor of Hispanic ministry and chairman of the Department of Religious Education and Pastoral Ministry at Boston College.

We approach Our Lady as Juan Diego did — with faith.

“The story of Our Lady of Guadalupe is a story of faith,” said Ospino. “It’s the story of a community of Catholics, of people who see the possibility of God becoming present in history and happening in the experience of Guadalupe.”

So first, Our Lady of Guadalupe is to be understood by faith, he said. Second, she is to be understood in the context of the historical moment in which the apparition took place. There was fighting between the Spanish and the Indigenous community — and the Natives were being wiped out.

Nevertheless, there was a way to peace.

“Our Lady of Guadalupe appeared as an Indigenous woman, which is recognized as a sacred symbol both by the Spanish conquistadores and the Indigenous communities,” said Ospino. “It’s powerful. In some ways she brings peace, a new beginning at a time people were struggling.”

A third way to understand Our Lady of Guadalupe is as a symbol of hope and accompaniment on the part of God with people who are suffering and struggling, said Ospino.

“Our Lady of Guadalupe is highly appreciated by people, largely by women, who struggle,” said Ospino. “Life is not easy on them. And yet, they have Our Lady of Guadalupe as an inspiration to move forward.

“She is a mother. She appears as a pregnant woman. She is a gift of life about to give life. She is a Morenita — a brown-skinned Indigenous woman. A lot of Latinos in the United States struggle with questions of race, discrimination and poverty. . . . She looks like us, so there is this special love the Latino community has about her.”

But Latinos are not the only ones who look at Our Lady of Guadalupe as a symbol of hope, said Ospino. The pro-life movement is very fond of her. She appears as someone pregnant, open to life, who cares about the child in the womb.

It is not uncommon for the Blessed Virgin Mary to appear in ethnic or cultural ways to different people in different places at different times, according to Matovina.

“This is part of a long-standing Marian tradition in the church,” said Matovina. “Apparitions are a kind of a spiritual genre that tell us more about the beauty and evangelizing power of the Virgin Mary.

“For Guadalupe specifically, St. John Paul II said it best:  ‘She is the model of a perfectly enculturated evangelization.’ Many of the missioners — not all — tried to impose Iberian, Spanish cultural and linguistic ways as they were teaching the Catholic faith.

“Guadalupe came as one of the people. She was a Nahuatl woman in her appearance, mannerisms, speech and dress. She came as one of them. And at the same time, she is the Mother of God — the Mary of the Catholic faith.”

Matovina once went to a “serenade” (a sort of performance with music) in San Antonio in honor of Our Lady of Guadalupe. The reactions of the people led him to some profound insights.

One moment was especially powerful: when the young man portraying Juan Diego, who had started out stooped and humble, stood tall and proud, arms outstretched, so he could display the miraculous image on his chest.

The bishop and his aides knelt before the image — and in doing so, knelt to Juan Diego, too.

“The young people presented the drama in a powerful way,” said Matovina, “and it occurred to me . . . the story of Juan Diego is the story of America. It’s the story of the marginal person, the put-down person, the Native person, the Black person, the immigrant person, the disabled person, the unborn child.

“It’s the story of the people who are forgotten and on the edge being vindicated because the Mother of God comes to them. She loves everyone, she’s the mother of all, but she has a preferential love for those most in need.”

The undeniable miracle of Our Lady of Guadalupe is not just that she appeared to Juan Diego in 1531, according to Matovina. The miracle is that she continues to appear to millions on T-shirts, tattoos, magnets and statues in churches around the world.

Our Lady of Guadalupe never went away. She continues to comfort, inspire and evangelize today.

With greatest devotion

Devotion to Our Lady of Guadalupe has long been an integral part of life for many Mexican families. This was certainly true for Father Gerardo “Jerry” Arano-Ponce while he was growing up in Veracruz, Mexico.

“The tender love to the mother of Jesus under her title Our Lady of Guadalupe has always been present in my heart as part of my family upbringing,” said Father Arano-Ponce, pastor of Queen of the Holy Rosary Parish in Bucyrus-Wea.

“My mother always reminded my sister and me to pray the Magnificat daily in front of Our Lady’s icon before leaving for school,” he said. “It was just a habit to do that.”

His first visit to the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe had a tremendous impact on him.

“When I was six years old, we made a family pilgrimage to the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico City, and that was a very special moment in my young heart and vocation,” said Father Arano-Ponce.

Like many pilgrims, he was drawn to the miraculous image of Our Lady that was imprinted on the tilma of St. Juan Diego — a rough, poncho-like garment made of cactus fiber.

“I was glued to Our Lady’s eyes [on the] tilma,” he recalled, “and my heart was bigger than my body when I entered the basilica — filled with faith, unshakable trust in Mary and pure joy.”

Now, whenever he returns to Mexico to visit his family, he goes first to the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico City.

“After visiting Our Lady of Guadalupe, then I can go visit my family and friends,” said Father Arano-Ponce. “It’s just the natural thing to do for me, and my family knows that, and they love it. I cannot think of going back to Mexico without seeing Our Lady of Guadalupe.”

The apparition story

The first Franciscan missionaries to Mexico faced a formidable challenge of evangelization.

The Indigenous Aztecs viewed the Spanish with suspicion and resentment because the conquistadores achieved their dominance by violence. They also brought diseases that decimated the Native population.

And yet, despite this time of death, destruction and despair, some Aztecs believed in the Gospel and were baptized. Among them was a humble Native man named Cuauhtlatoatzin, who had changed his name upon baptism to Juan Diego, and his wife Maria Lucia.

It was at dawn on Dec. 9, 1531, when Juan Diego was walking from his home in Tulpetlac to the Franciscan mission in Tlatelolco.

As he passed the Hill of Tepeyac, he heard the singing of birds and a woman’s voice call him by name in Nahuatl, his native language. He looked and saw the incandescent figure of a woman.

She was like him, a Native, and she identified herself as “the Virgin Holy Mary, Mother of the True God,” and asked him to go to the bishop and ask that a shrine to her be built at that site.

Juan Diego did so, but Bishop Juan de Zumarraga was skeptical and asked him to come back another time.

Discouraged, Juan Diego returned to the hill and asked the lady to send someone more important, but she insisted that he was to do this task.

There were five appearances of the Virgin in all.

The last occurred when Juan Diego returned to the hill with the request from the bishop for a sign. She had him cut Castilian roses growing there — unusual, because it was winter and such roses did not grow in Mexico. He gathered the roses in his cloak, called a tilma, and took them to the bishop.

When Juan Diego arrived at the bishop’s house, he let down the tilma and the miraculous roses fell to the floor.

But that was not all. Imprinted on his tilma was a sight that drove the bishop and everyone else in attendance to their knees: a stunning image of the lady, who came to be known as Our Lady of Guadalupe.

A chapel was built on the Hill of Tepeyac. Over the years, succeeding churches were built. The latest was a basilica in 1976. Juan Diego died in 1548 and was declared a saint in 2000; his feast day is Dec. 9. The feast day of Our Lady of Guadalupe is Dec. 12.