Our Lady of Guadalupe

478 years ago, the Mother of God chose to appear to Juan Diego, a man who held no worldly status. He tried to share this miraculous appearance and this Lady’s request with a man entrusted with the grave responsibility to preach, teach, and administer to souls. This man of God dismissed him as a lunatic. On December 12, the Lady appeared to him a third time (In matters of faith, the # 3 represents putting the divine stamp on something). The Lady sent the man to gather flowers from a hilltop. He must have thought: it is the middle of winter – there are no flowers! Humbly, he set out, and traversed up the hill. And to his surprise he discovers an incredible beautiful display of roses. He brings them to the Lady. She helps him arrange the roses in his cloak and tells him to bring them to the bishop. I’m guessing, he’s thinking to himself: the bishop is a smart man, he will know I couldn’t have pulled these roses out of thin air- who’s loony now. Little did he know, the Lady had more than roses in store for the bishop! He pours the roses out at the Bishop’s feet, and to everyone’s surprise the image of the Lady appears on the inside of the cloak. To this very day, when one looks very closely at the image of the Lady on the cloak, in her eyes is the reflection of the bishop in that moment, along with other details of the room that day.
 
This image of Our Lady of Guadalupe resides in a Basilica just outside Mexico City. Even though it defies scientific explanation, I can attest; the colors on the cloak have not faded despite the passage of hundreds of years. Yes deacon, that is amazing, but why should I concern myself with something that took place hundreds of years ago?
 
In 1754, 223 years after Our Lady of Guadalupe’s appearance, Pope Benedict XIV declared December 12 a Holyday. 154 years after that, in 1908, St. Pius X saw fit to entrust Our Lady of Guadalupe with the protection of the papacy and sought her intercession for the Church and the preservation of the faith. Just 37 years more and Pope Pius XII, was compelled to declare her Patroness of the America’s. Then in 1961, St. Pope John XXIII declared her Mother and Teacher of the America’s. In 1979, St. Pope John Paul II declared her the Light of the New Evangelization of America. And then, in 1998, he declared her the Protectress of the Unborn.
 
Why would God find it necessary to preserve this image? This image appears on a cloak made of cactus fibers, whose natural life span would be 30 years. There are no brush strokes on an image that appeared almost 500 years ago – technologically that was impossible! After analyzing the fibers and the coloring on the cloak, Dr. Richard Kohn, the Nobel Prize Winner in chemistry testified: Its element doesn’t exist on this earth. It’s not of nature. It’s supernatural! The arrangement of the stars on the cloak is not random artistic positioning. The constellations appear in the exact position they would have appeared the morning of December 12, 1531, in Guadalupe, Mexico.
 
Why preserve this image? Why does she matter to us? We live in a world where human life is becoming less and less sacred, a world in which the nucleus of the family is falling apart, a world where marriage is disposable. A great sign appeared in the sky, a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars. She was with child and wailed aloud in pain as she labored to give birth (Revelation 12:1-5). Mary, our Heavenly Mother, points to the qualities of true feministic beauty, to motherhood and to the dignity associated with human life. I sense, in a period where forces are in play, seeking to destroy family and faith, further promoting a culture of death, we have been given this apparition of The Mother of God, the Virgin Mary, Our Lady of Guadalupe, as our hope for renewal of faith in our homes. So that we will be in awe of God’s holiness too, that we will seek His mercy, and that we will humble ourselves and become the creation we were created to be.
 
Truths of Our Lady of Guadalupe Site: http://www.secretsoftheimage.org/en/index.html