Our Lady of Guadalupe

The Apparitions

Between December 9 and December 12, 1531, a woman appeared four times to Juan Diego, a recently baptized indigenous man, on the hill of Tepeyac outside Mexico City. She spoke to him in his native Nahuatl language. She told him she was the Virgin Mary, Mother of the true God, and she asked him to request that a church be built on that hill.

Juan Diego went to the bishop, Juan de Zumarraga, who was skeptical and asked for a sign. Mary told Juan Diego to gather roses from the hilltop, which was barren and cold in December. He found Castilian roses blooming there. He gathered them in his tilma, his cloak, and brought them to the bishop.

When he opened his tilma before the bishop, the roses fell to the floor. But on the fabric of the cloak, an image had appeared: a woman clothed with the sun, standing on the moon, crowned with stars. The bishop fell to his knees.

The Image That Cannot Be Explained

The tilma of Juan Diego is now housed in the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico City, the most visited Catholic shrine in the world. Scientists have studied it for nearly five centuries and cannot explain it.

The fabric, which should have deteriorated within twenty years, is intact after nearly five hundred. There is no brushwork visible under magnification. The image has no underdrawing and no sizing. In 1929, an ophthalmologist examining a high-resolution photograph of the image discovered reflections in the eyes of the Virgin consistent with the reflections of a human eye, showing figures that appear to be Juan Diego and the bishop at the moment the tilma was opened.

The image shows a woman in the posture of prayer, clothed with the sun, standing on a crescent moon, with a crown of stars. She is pregnant. Her garments are covered with symbols drawn from Aztec cosmology, which the indigenous people of Mexico could read like a text. She was speaking to them in their own language.

Nine Million Conversions

Before the apparitions, the evangelization of Mexico had largely stalled. The indigenous people had seen the violence of the conquest and had little reason to trust the God of the conquerors. In the decade following the apparitions, approximately nine million indigenous people converted to Christianity. Historians have no other explanation.

She came not as a European woman but as one of them: dark-skinned, speaking their language, wearing their symbols, standing on the moon (which represented their most powerful deity), and clothed with the sun (which represented another). She was not the God of the conquerors. She was the mother of the God who had come for them too.