Our Lady of Guadalupe

Feast (in the United States), Patroness of the Americas

Feast Day

December 12

The Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe commemorates the apparitions of the Blessed Virgin Mary to Saint Juan Diego Cuauhtlatoatzin on the hill of Tepeyac, north of Mexico City, between December 9 and 12, 1531, ten years after the fall of the Aztec capital Tenochtitlan to Hernan Cortes. In the four apparitions, Mary - speaking in Nahuatl, dressed as a young pregnant Indigenous noblewoman, with the moon under her feet and rays of the sun behind her - identified herself as the perfect ever-Virgin holy Mary, mother of the very true God by whom one lives, and asked that a church be built on Tepeyac for the consolation of the Indigenous peoples and all who would seek her intercession.

On December 12, when Juan Diego brought to Bishop Juan de Zumarraga the Castilian roses gathered on the wintry hill at Mary's instruction, his ayate-fiber tilma was found to bear the image now venerated in the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico City - the most-visited Marian shrine in the world. The tilma's preservation for nearly five centuries (the natural lifespan of cactus-fiber cloth is twenty to forty years), the absence of any underdrawing or sizing, and the iconographic symbolism (in which every detail spoke a language Indigenous Mexicans could read - the sash of pregnancy, the four-petaled glyph over the womb signifying the One True God, the obscured sun and moon meaning their gods are not gods) made Guadalupe the great evangelizing miracle of the Americas. An estimated nine million Indigenous Mexicans were baptized in the decade following 1531. Pope Pius XII declared Our Lady of Guadalupe Patroness of the Americas on October 12, 1945; Pope Saint John Paul II declared her Patroness of all the Americas (North, Central, and South) and Star of the New Evangelization in his apostolic exhortation Ecclesia in America (1999).