Our Lady of Guadalupe

About Our Lady of Guadalupe

In December 1531, ten years after the fall of Tenochtitlán, an indigenous man named Juan Diego was crossing Tepeyac hill when he heard his name called. A dark-skinned young woman spoke to him in Nahuatl, his own language, and asked for a church to be built there. The bishop asked for a sign. She sent Juan Diego to gather roses at the top of the hill, in December, where there was nothing but rock and cactus — and he carried them folded in his tilma. When he opened the cloak before the bishop, the flowers fell and the image remained.

The tilma is displayed in Mexico City and the shrine is the most visited in the Catholic world. What the apparition meant was immediate: God spoke the language of the conquered and took their face.

She is patroness of the Americas, mother of mothers, of women, of indigenous peoples and of everyone far from home — migrants above all. Her feast is 12 December.

A message from Our Lady of Guadalupe is sent on 12 December, on Mother's Day, for pregnancies and births, and to anyone living far from family.

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