Guadalupe still captures hearts, minds

Miraculous image inspires local Catholics, pilgrims to visit Mexico City basilica

By J.D. Long-García | Nov. 30, 2009 | The Catholic Sun

MEXICO CITY — Vendors line the half-mile of sidewalk leading up to the Basilica of Saint Mary of Guadalupe. They set up early and take down late.

You can get anything from a statue of the Blessed Mother to pirated DVDs of the latest romantic comedy, quite possibly still in theaters. You can get street tacos, five for a dollar, or snow cones.

If you join the throngs of pilgrims shuffling between the vendors, you have to be careful not to bump into the person in front of you. As many as 20 million Catholic pilgrims ask for the Blessed Mother’s intercession at the basilica each year.

“She’s there to help us throughout our life,” said Rosa Maria Estrada, a Mexico City native who works with the Cursillo Movement in Phoenix. “It’s very beautiful to go several times a year just to pray at the basilica.”

When you walk into the great plaza — bigger than two football fields — the first thing you see is the Antigua Basilica, or “Old Basilica,” where the image of Our Lady of Guadalupe resided from 1709 until 1976. Also known as the Expiatory Temple of Christ the King, it was the fourth building erected to house the image.

Unlike this massive, colonial-style basilica — made of brick and cement — the image Our Lady of Guadalupe left behind on a cloak made of cactus fibers is virtually unblemished.

The Guadalupe happening

When Spanish conquistadors first arrived in what is now Mexico, they found an Aztec-dominated culture of human sacrifice. While estimates vary, many historians suggest the Aztecs sacrificed a minimum of 10,000 people a year.

“The community believed they had to have human sacrifices for the sun to rise,” explained James DeMars, composer of the opera “Guadalupe: Our Lady of the Roses.”

“Within that horrendous conflict, the Aztecs were defeated in such a way that they had nothing to hold on to — no pride, no social structure,” he said. “They were devastated by disease and had nowhere to turn.”

It would be like demonstrating to modern America that medical science is completely wrong, said DeMars, whose opera is showing at the Phoenix Art Museum this month.

“For the Aztecs, everything they believed in — their gods, their system of belief, their confidence — was shattered when hundreds of Spaniards on horseback coordinated a complete revolution,” he said.

Some 10 years after the Aztecs were conquered, “with arrows and shields put aside,” a peasant on his way to church met a mysterious woman whose clothes shone like the sun. It was Dec. 9, 1531.

The woman, who appeared several times to Juan Diego Cuauhtlatoatzin, said she was “Holy Mary, Mother of the one great God of truth who gives us life.”

She asked that a temple be built for her on Tepeyac, the hill where she appeared in modern day Mexico City. To convince the local ordinary, she asked Juan Diego to climb to the top of the hill and gather Castilian roses — which were out of season.

Juan Diego did as she asked, gathering the roses in his cactus-fiber cloak and presenting them to the local bishop Dec. 12. The bishop — a Franciscan named Juan de Zumárraga, according to tradition — was not only amazed to see roses in the dead of winter, but also to see what the roses left behind — an image of Our Lady of Guadalupe.

“Her message, both spoken as recorded in the Nican Mopohua and in the image itself, implies the seeds of the Gospel,” said Fr. Robert Gonzalez, a Guadalupe expert serving the Tucson Diocese.

“She doesn’t utter one word of condemnation toward the Aztec sacrifices,” he added. “She evangelizes not with vinegar, but with honey and truth.”

Fr. Gonzalez noted that Our Lady of Guadalupe has a mestiza face — not Indian nor Spanish, but a mix. It signals inclusiveness and acceptance.

The flowers on her mantle are a summons to build a new society of love and peace, Fr. Gonzalez said.

These apparitions sparked unparalleled conversions. In a relatively short period of time, millions converted to Christianity. Before Our Lady of Guadalupe, missionaries weren’t getting much traction.

Pilgrims

After nearly 500 years, the tilma still rests on Tepeyac, and millions continue to be transformed by it. So many, in fact, that the “Nueva Basilica” was designed to accommodate the constant influx of pilgrims.

When you first see the newer basilica, one might think it’s too modern to be the location of what’s probably the most important image in the history of the Western Hemisphere. But as time is spent there, it makes more sense. The new basilica is practical.

The basilica — which holds 10,000 — is circular and measures some 100 meters in diameter. From just about every entrance, you can see the tilma. 

The Basilica of St. Mary of Guadalupe, which is the second most visited Catholic site on Earth — second only to the Vatican — is also a local parish.

Throughout the day, priests celebrate Mass constantly from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m., regularly drawing 1,000 Catholics to each liturgy.

Priests hear confessions all day in various languages and a steady stream of pilgrims make their way to the image itself.

A few years ago, Oscar Cota, a parishioner at St. Mary in Chandler, visited the basilica.

“Looking at it, it looks like it was just created,” he said. “There’s no fade.”

Cota, a transplant patient, has a special devotion to Our Lady of Guadalupe. The day he came out of surgery with a new kidney was Dec. 12 — her feast day.

“That night I came out alive and I’ll never forget it,” he said. “So I thank my mother for listening.”

For Richard Jeffrey, who helped organize the Knights of Columbus Guadalupe Festival in Phoenix Aug. 8, devotion to Our Lady of Guadalupe came through a poster.

Jeffrey was in Mexico in 2003, the year Juan Diego was canonized. Everyone was selling posters of the humble peasant who did as the Blessed Mother asked, so Jeffrey decided to buy one.

He also bought a poster of Our Lady of Guadalupe for his neighbor, who suggested he frame his image of Juan Diego. 

“The poster was like two bucks,” he laughed. “She had it framed and gave me the bill for $160.”

It turns out it was money well spent. After Pope John Paul II canonized Juan Diego, Jeffrey’s poster wound up on a Phoenix Fire Department engine, leading a procession to Immaculate Heart of Mary Parish.

“My poster started disappearing. People brought it to their homes for private devotions,” he said. “People would call me for events and ask me to bring my Juan Diego poster.”

Through Juan Diego, Jeffrey came to know Our Lady of Guadalupe. Well, that goes for all of us.

“Through her evangelization, the New World converted,” Jeffrey said. “But it was through Juan Diego telling the story that people found out about it.”

Pipo Coronel, a parishioner at St. Timothy in Mesa, was in Mexico City for Juan Diego’s canonization.

“What’s happening there is real,” he said. “And I guess the presence of JPII just turbo-charged the whole experience. We all loved him and admired him so much.”

Coronel, who was born in Venezuela, learned much more about Our Lady of Guadalupe after moving to the Phoenix Diocese. He wanted to visit the basilica ever since.

“Here you have what you have read about for so many years,” he said of seeing the image. “It was a humbling experience.”

On weekends, Mexican dancers dressed in traditional Aztec clothing perform for the Blessed Mother in the giant plaza. Pilgrims will stop and watch for a few minutes on their way to one of the many chapels on the basilica grounds — it’s like a Disneyland of prayer.

Our Lady of Phoenix

Phoenix Catholics will see similar traditional dance during the Honor Your Mother event Dec. 6 at the Diocesan Pastoral Center. Catholics will gather at Immaculate Heart of Mary for a procession that will lead to St. Mary’s Basilica, culminating in a Mass celebrated by Bishop Thomas J. Olmsted.

The Our Lady of Guadalupe event will conclude the Phoenix Diocese’s 40th anniversary celebration. She is the patroness of the diocese as well as the Americas and her message still resonates with the local Church.

“This is the first model for immigration,” said DeMars, whose opera was originally going to be a Requiem Mass for the immigrants who died crossing the desert illegally. “Where are the biggest problems in our world today? They are dealing with immigration or ethnic conflict.”

His producer, Robert Doyle of Canyon Records, helped DeMars write the final scene of the opera.

“We divide ourselves up. We create tension,” Doyle said. “We define family way too narrowly. The idea behind this comes from a loving mom. She loves all of her children — she doesn’t divide them up.”

That’s certainly the case on the basilica grounds, where the rich and the poor, the sick and the healthy walk together on the same hill where Juan Diego met the Blessed Mother.

Fr. Gonzalez, who’s working on a book about Our Lady of Guadalupe, said her message should not be boiled down to a political one.

When you go to the Basilica of St. Mary of Guadalupe, he said, something is going to happen. You will be transformed.

“You’ll encounter God through the image. Christ must become the center of your life,” Fr. Gonzalez said. “It’s much more than going to a place to pray. It’s putting piety into practice.”