Hispanic people across the United States and around the world commemorate the 12th of December as the feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe, an apparition that allegedly happened in Tepeyac Hill in modern-day Mexico City in 1531.
According to Spanish-Mexican records, an indigenous man named Juan Diego saw the Virgin Mary in the appearance of a pregnant Nahua or Aztec woman. Mary asked Juan Diego to tell the bishop of Mexico City to build her a church at the top of the hill of the apparition site. She also reminded Juan Diego of her maternal care for the indigenous tribes of Mexico.
When asked for proof if it was the Virgin Mary who appeared to Juan Diego, he was instructed to pick flowers on top of Tepeyac Hill, a peculiar rarity as no flowers were growing in the Mexican winter. Juan Diego kept the flowers in his tilma, an indigenous cloak worn during that time, and presented the flowers to the bishop.
As the flowers dropped to the floor, an image of the Virgin Mary - similar to how Juan Diego saw her - was imprinted in his tilma.
Since then, a church was built in Tepeyac Hill, just as the Virgin Mary requested.
Over the years and decades since the apparition, millions of Aztecs and other indigenous Mexican tribes were converted to Catholicism due to the significant influence of the Virgin Mary being depicted as an indigenous Mexican just like them.
Overland, the devotion was shared by several Central American Hispanics. Through the trans-Pacific Manila-Acapulco galleon trade, the devotion to the Virgin of Guadalupe found its way to the Philippines and flourished as a devotion in several churches, primarily in the town of Pagsanjan in the province of Laguna, southeast of Manila, where the image was venerated since 1687.
Just like the separate Spanish devotion of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Extremadura, the Guadalupe of Mexico was also considered a "Black Madonna," an image of the Virgin Mary in which it was depicted as dark-skinned.
Several scientific experiments have been conducted on Juan Diego's tilma, resulting in scientists becoming baffled as to how the tilma remained intact for almost 500 years given the material used at the time was supposed to disintegrate easily.
Given its impact on the Hispanic world, there are several places in the United States where they publicly celebrate the December 12 feast, especially in US states bordering Mexico.
Celebrations in Rome
In his homily for the Mass in honor of Our Lady of Guadalupe, Pope Francis - himself a Latin American - focused on the miraculous image preserved in the tilma of Juan Diego, as well as the story of how the devotion came about.
"It is the image of the first disciple, of the mother of all believers, of the Church herself," he said, "which is imprinted in the humility of what we are and what we have, which is not worth much, but which will be something great in the eyes of God."
Francis added that the message of the image in the tilma was simple - that the Virgin Mary, who Catholics believe as the mother of Jesus, was "to remain permanently imprinted on these poor clothes, perfumed by virtues gathered in a world that seems incapable of producing them."
To celebrate Mary is to celebrate the closeness and tenderness of God who meets His people, who does not leave us alone, who has given us a Mother who cares for us and accompanies us. #OurLadyofGuadalupe
— Pope Francis (@Pontifex) December 12, 2023
Separately, the pontiff tweeted a similar message.
"To celebrate Mary is to celebrate the closeness and tenderness of God who meets his people, who does not leave us alone, who has given us a mother who cares for us and accompanies us," he wrote on X, formerly Twitter.
Francis visited the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe near Mexico City in 2016, where he had the chance to privately venerate the image in a small room behind the Basilica's sanctuary.
Guadalupe and the Flower World Prophecy
The National Catholic Register published an article on Tuesday (December 12) about what could be considered as the Virgin Mary is the fulfillment of Aztec prophecy and the conversion of Latin America to Catholicism while the Protestant Reformation was ongoing.
In their book "Guadalupe and the Flower World Prophecy: How God Prepared the Americas for Conversion Before the Lady Appeared," husband-and-wife authors Joseph Julian and Monique Gonzalez argued that Juan Diego's encounters with the Virgin Mary and the oral telling of a prophecy connected to the apparition were the motivations for the conversion of millions of native Americans.
The story relating to the apparition was told in Nahuatl, the native language of the Aztecs and Juan Diego's only tongue, and through Franciscan missionaries who learned Nahuatl and recorded the words of songs and poems being told by the natives to each other. The author couple revealed that there were several nearly-identical texts of the same song in different regions of Mexico and beyond at different times, which testified to the distances the songs traveled and to the Nahua skill at memorization.
Additionally, the first detailed account of the Virgin Mary's appearances at Tepeyac preserved the prose text in the Nahuatl language called "Nican Mopohua," which in English translates to "Here it is Told."
Recorded in 1649 by a priest named Fr. Luis Lasso de la Vega, the story was filled with colorful details and images that exactly corresponded to the mythic paradise of pagan Nahua spiritual tradition, known as "Xochitlalpan" or the "Flower World," which perfectly tied with the story of Juan Diego's apparent discovery of flowers in the middle of December, when flowers do not bloom.
The theory of the Flower World as a Nahua paradise was relatively recent in studies about pre-Hispanic Mesoamerican culture. In 1992, University of Arizona anthropology professor Jane Hill published a groundbreaking paper in the Journal of Anthropological Research titled "The Flower World of Old Uto-Aztecan."
The paper revealed the frequency with which flower motifs have appeared in a huge range of Indigenous non-Christian cultures stretching from the American Southwest to Central America. It was said that the flower references were accompanied by "chromaticism," which was the use of, and references to, rainbows, hummingbirds, shells, colorful insects, and other brilliant, iridescent colors - all of which were often associated with a song.
Hill argued that such motifs "must represent a very ancient level of religious thought," and she sought to link flower-related motifs to Indigenous people's attempts to access a "spirit world" of beauty and immortality beyond the one they experienced at that time. Hill's writings have inspired a large body of scholarship finding symbolic meaning in the floral themes that were ubiquitous in Indigenous visual art and poetry.
One example of such parallelisms was that between the "Nican Mopohua" and the Nahuatl song poem "Cuicapeuhcayotl" ("The Origin of Songs"), transcribed by the friar Bernardino de Sahagún in about 1560 as part of a large collection known as the "Cantares Mexicanos." Around 20% of the poems in the "Cantares" contain Flower World motifs.
However, the Gonzalezes argued that Juan Diego and his indigenous contemporaries were familiar with the "Cuicapeuhcayotl" or poems like it, and that Juan Diego's encounter with the Virgin Mary set in a world of transformative spiritual experience that they knew well, resonated powerfully.
In other words, for Juan Diego and the Nahua people, the "Cuicapeuhcayotl" was a prophecy and the Virgin Mary's appearance and the presence of flowers in her appearances was the fulfillment of such prophecies.
"It was the story itself, the encounter with the Flower World and the mythic power of [Juan Diego's] hero's journey, that converted those millions of people," Joseph Gonzalez told the Register.
While neither of the co-authors were academic scholars, their personal experience as Catholic converts pushed them to connect the pre-Hispanic Nahua prophecy with the story of Juan Diego and what they considered as the fulfillment of such prophecy. Joseph is a composer with extensive film and television experience who lapsed in his Catholic faith only to return to practice it again in 2008. Monique, on the other hand, is a convert to Catholicism and a devotee of the Virgin of Guadalupe. The couple married in 2009.
