Our Lady of Guadalupe

In December 1531, ten years after the Spanish conquest of Mexico, the Virgin Mary appeared on the hill of Tepeyac, outside Mexico City, to Juan Diego, a middle-aged Indigenous convert. She spoke to him tenderly in his own Nahuatl language and asked that a church be built on that spot. When Juan Diego took her request to Bishop Juan de Zumárraga, the bishop asked for a sign.

On December 12, Mary sent Juan Diego to the top of the hill, where he found Castilian roses blooming in the winter cold. He gathered them in his tilma, a cloak woven from cactus fiber, and carried them to the bishop. When he opened the cloak and the roses fell to the floor, an image of the Virgin was revealed on the cloth. She appears as a young woman of mixed features, clothed with the sun, standing on the moon, her mantle covered with stars, and wearing a dark sash that many read as a sign that she is with child.

The image still hangs in the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico City, one of the most visited Catholic shrines in the world. In the years that followed, great numbers of Indigenous people embraced the faith. St. John Paul II named her patroness of all the Americas, and December 12 is a feast in the United States.