Saint Juan Diego Cuauhtlatoatzin
Layman
- Feast Day
- December 9
- Life
- 1474–1548
- Canonized
- 2002
- Born
- Cuautitlan, near Tenochtitlan (modern Mexico City)
Cuauhtlatoatzin (Nahuatl for he who speaks like an eagle) was born around 1474 in the Indigenous village of Cuautitlan, then part of the Aztec confederation. He belonged to the Chichimec ethnic group and lived as a married farmer and weaver of mats. After the Spanish conquest of Tenochtitlan in 1521, the Franciscan missionaries arrived in 1524; Cuauhtlatoatzin and his wife Maria Lucia received baptism around 1524-1525, taking the names Juan Diego and Maria Lucia.
On Saturday, December 9, 1531, while walking from his village to catechism class at Tlatelolco, Juan Diego had the first of five apparitions on the hill of Tepeyac, north of Mexico City. The lady, identifying herself in Nahuatl as the perfect ever-Virgin holy Mary, mother of the very true God, asked that a church be built on the spot. Bishop Juan de Zumarraga of Mexico, after initial skepticism, asked for a sign. On December 12, when Juan Diego returned to Tepeyac to gather flowers in his tilma (cloak) at the Lady's instruction, and unrolled it before the bishop, the Castilian roses fell out and on the rough ayate-fiber tilma was imprinted the image now venerated as Nuestra Senora de Guadalupe. Juan Diego spent the rest of his life as the lay custodian of the small chapel built at Tepeyac, dying there on May 30, 1548. The mission of evangelizing the Indigenous peoples of New Spain, which had been faltering, was transformed: an estimated nine million Aztecs received baptism in the decade following the apparitions. Pope Saint John Paul II beatified him in 1990 and canonized him on July 31, 2002, calling him the first indigenous Saint of the American Continent.
Juan Diego is the model of the Christian layman of humble station whom God chooses precisely because he is a nobody in worldly terms - in his own words to Our Lady, a piece of rope, a small ladder, a little man. He is the patron of the inculturation of the Gospel: not its imposition by conquest but its reception by a native people in their own language and culture.
Patronages
indigenous peoples of the Americas · Mexican-American Catholics
From Saint Juan Diego Cuauhtlatoatzin
"Blessed Juan Diego, a good, Christian Indian, whom simple people have always considered a saint!"
Sources