Portsmouth Abbey      

Feast: December 12

On December 9,  1531, Juan Diego,an Indian peasant about 50 years old was walking near an ancient pagan site near Mexico City, a hill once sacred to the earth goddess, Tonanzin. Sud­denly, he saw an apparition of Our Lady, who told him to go to the archbishop and erect a church on this spot which was to be dedicated to her. In the pattern of subsequent apparitions of Our Lady in France, Portugal and most recently in Croatia, the message was greeted with skepticism until a miracle con­firmed the apparition. This took the form of roses sprouting at the site which Juan Diego gathered up in his cloak at the command of the Virgin and brought to the archbishop three days after the first vision, on December 12. When he opened his cloak, the roses fell on to the ground before the archbishop and on the cloth was a miraculous painting of Our Lady portrayed as she is in the Book of Revelation, with a crescent moon at her feet and 12 stars at her head, clad in a blue robe decorated with golden stars surrounded by rays of the sun. Supporting her is a cherub with Indian features. Mary likewise has the face of an Indian. Ever since, Our Lady has had a central place in popular devotion in Mexico, her cult spreading quickly through­out Spanish America and beyond.

Repeated scientific analysis of the cloth has failed to disprove the authenticity of this miracle, and it remains an indigenous, specifically Mexican contribution to the Catholic Church. One of the positive effects of the Spanish conquest of the New World was the Christianization of the native peoples. A key element in the rapid, mass conversion of such a large number of people stems from the disillusionment of the populace with their pagan gods to stem the tide of the invading con­quistadors. But also contributing to this sense of futility was a belief that their pagan gods were willing to sacrifice them­selves for the people, a belief they could retain when pre­sented in a new form. In the vacuum they found themselves in at the failure of their pagan gods, the Indians eagerly em­braced the new religion which preached a similar doctrine of salvation through the self-sacrifice of a man-God, and which included in its membership the most downtrodden elements of so­ciety. In much the same way as the deities of old in the Greco- Roman world were Christianized, the Mexican gods were assimi­lated to the new religion, filling the lacuna left by their disappearance under the Spanish military and the missionaries of Jesus and Our Lady.

Devotion to Our Lady of Guadalupe has never lost its appeal despite the anti-Spanish feeling and anti-clericalism that have been part of the Mexican consciousness since the arri­val of the first explorers, shortly after Columbus' voyage to the New World in 1492. The Virgin is the one constant, a focus of unity and national identity, a source of pride and a mir­aculous witness that God through Our Lady was as concerned for the inhabitants of the New World as for the Europeans.

(Text taken from one of Fr Damian's reflections)