The Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe was this past week — December 12. The great pilgrimage, photographed above, (folks in the hundreds of thousands, walking from all over Mexico to Tepeyac) didn't take place this year because of Covid restrictions. So they celebrated in their home parishes and virtually. We might linger in the Guadalupe atmosphere a few moments. Do you know the full story?
Sr. Donna Korba, IHM summarized it in an online article in 2007
The year is 1521. Mexico City (the capital of the Aztec Empire) is conquered. An entire culture is annihilated, a people is stripped of her dignity and a nation is destroyed. It is one of the darkest moments in the history of America. The conquerors: the Spanish. The conquered: the Aztec Indigenous.
Over the next ten years, Franciscan missionaries arrive and would begin the conversion of a conquered nation to Spanish Catholicism. Among the first converts is an indigenous man Singing Eagle and his wife. They take their baptismal names of Juan Diego and Maria Lucia.
Eventually, Juan Diego becomes a childless widower and moves in with an elderly uncle nearer to Mexico City. On his way to Saturday dawn Mass he has his first encounter with the Lady who meets him standing on the ground in a kind of golden mist. These are the words of her first instruction to him.
"Know and be certain in your heart, that I am the ever Virgin holy Mary, Mother of the God of Great Truth (Teolt), of the One through whom we live, the creator of all persons, the Lord of Heaven and Earth. I very much desire that my hermitage be erected in this place. In it I will show and give to all people all my love, my compassion, my help, and my protection, because I am your merciful Mother and the Mother of all nations that live on this earth who would love me and who would place their confidence in me. I will hear their laments and cure all their miseries, misfortunes, and sorrows."
Of course, like Mary Magdalene on Easter morning, and Bernadette of Lourdes and the children of Fatima, when attempting to deliver the Lady's message to the Spanish bishop, he is distrusted and hassled.
Sr. Donna Korba continues, summarizing the message. It is a revolutionary message—Gospel-like in the change it invites.
The message she (the Lady) wanted delivered. Build me a home at Tepeyac in America where pilgrims can come and know themselves as my children and know me as their mother. Build me a home at Tepeyac in America where there are no conquerors and no conquered, only the possibility of a New World and a New humanity. Build me a home at Tepeyac in America where the powerful will be brought low and the lowly will be raised up and where all my children will live as brothers and sisters."
Notice, the Lady the asks for a home. She asks for a new world and new kind of humanity. A humanity of reversals, as she sings about in her Magnificat. No more, this people over that people. She uses the word all four times: all persons, all people, all my love, all nations. Pretty incredible, isn't it? What are the implications?
"Build me a home." Yet we disparage, frighten, threaten, mistreat (even the children) of those who would come here, to this land of troubled, immigrant peoples. Mary asks for a home, anticipating the words of the one with whom she is pregnant, "When I was a stranger, you welcomed me." Matthew 25:35.
Pope John Paul II was elected pope in October 1978. Two months later he visited Guadalupe (his first trip outside of Rome) and declared her to be the patroness of this hemisphere. John Paul was the one who spoke "America" in the singular, absent the North, South, Central divisive distinctions. Stunning really!
Sister Donna ends with the following prayer, which I would suggest is best in expressing the unsentimental meaning of the Guadalupe.
Our Lady of Guadalupe of Tepeyac, the Mountain of the Beatitudes in America, the place of the Incarnation in America.
Our Lady of Guadalupe of Tepeyac, the place where the lowly, the poor, the meek and the persecuted are raised up and the mighty are brought low.
Our Lady of Guadalupe, woman of mestizo face, symbol of America, symbol of a New World and a New Church where there are no oppressors and no oppressed, only sisters and brothers in Christ.
Five hundred years ago, in 1531, you appeared to Juan Diego, in the darkest moments of American history. In 2007 (2020-2021) you come to us in difficult times as well. You come expecting, pregnant with hope as you came to your cousin Elizabeth in Luke's' Gospel.
You come requesting a home in our hearts and a place in our lives as you requested a home in the time of Juan Diego. We have lost a sense of the dignity of life. We have lost a sense of the dignity of the lives of those who are different from us and those yet to be born.
Touch our hearts. Teach us once again the message of peace, love, life and unity. Give us the courage once again to be a New Church, to be brothers and sisters to all the Juan Diegos of our time—to all the Juan Diegos of our day. Teach us to live as your children, as brothers and sisters to each other with you as our Mother, Sister, Example, and Friend. Mary of Guadalupe, pray for us.
