"From the Office of Bishop Raymond J Lahey, Diocese of Antigonish, NS"

Our Lady of Guadalupe

On Sunday, July 11, I celebrated the annual Mass at the shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe at Johnstown. The work of Monsignor MacLean, who as a naval chaplain became aware of the devotion in Mexico, its centerpiece is a striking mosaic of Mary’s image. From its lovely hilltop situation overlooking the Bras d’Or Lakes, it appropriately marks here in Canada the title of under which Mary is recognized as patroness of all America.

The story of Guadalupe began in to December 1531, when on Tepeyac, a small hill (later called Guadalupe, and now in Mexico City), a poor Indian countryman, Juan Diego, heard himself called into the presence of a beautiful lady. She declared herself in Nahuatl to be “the ever-Virgin holy Mary, Mother of the God of Great Truth, Téotl, of the One through Whom We Live, the Creator, of Persons, the Owner of What is Near and Together, of the Creator of Heaven and Earth.” She asked only that a place of refuge be built in her honor, where she “would hear the laments, and remedy and cure all the miseries, misfortunes and sorrows,” of all who came to her.

For this, she instructed Juan Diego to approach the bishop. This he did, but was received with skepticism. After a second encounter he again saw the bishop, who demanded a sign. At his third encounter, the Lady commanded Juan to fill his mantle with flowers picked at the top of Tepeyac, and to carry them to the bishop. Amazingly, when he opened his mantle in the bishop’s presence, on it appeared the image of the Lady. On the mantle, Mary has the brown skin and features of a native person. From her person radiate the rays of the sun, and at her feet lies the moon. Her dress depicts the flowers of the earth and her robe the stars of heaven. It is this mantle that today hangs in the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico City.

John Paul II has declared Mary, under the title of Our Lady of Guadalupe, to be the patroness of the New Evangelization. This is particularly appropriate, for in the encounter at Guadalupe, Mary, like the Gospel itself, became inculturated. She appeared as a native, and spoke the native language. She used terms that were significant to the indigenous peoples, identifying the Spanish title, “the God of Great Truth,” with the native title, “Téotl”. She pointed to God and to Jesus Christ as being at the very center of the Christian Gospel, and yet her expressions were genuinely cosmic, bringing together the things of heaven and the things of creation so central to native culture.

At Guadalupe, Mary appeared not to the bishop, but to a poor native countryman, whose people had only recently been conquered by the Christian Spaniards. Few natives had become Christian, and those who did were not welcome as priests or religious; indeed they had few civil rights and were often oppressed by their conquerors. But Our Lady came to Guadalupe as “the mother of all the nations that live on this earth,” and her sanctuary was to be there to receive especially those with “miseries, misfortunes or sorrows.”

The Mexican people often speak, not of the “apparition” of Mary at Guadalupe - something distant - but of the “encounter” with her there - something far more intimate. Remarkably, after that encounter, literally millions of native people, experiencing Mary as “one of us,” accepted the Gospel and became Christians, a remarkable and sudden transformation. Significant, too, is that on any given day even now tens of thousands of people - teenagers and seniors, young married couples and children, rich and poor - will go to the shrine of Guadalupe simply to pray, and to encounter today, with the intercession of Mary, the consolation and the compassion of God that she promised.

Perhaps Guadalupe says something to us of the methods of evangelization needed for today: approaching people where they are, speaking to them in their own terms, directing them first to the love of God made visible in Jesus Christ, helping them to understand that the God of Christ and the God of all creation are one and the same, and assuring them that in finding God they will encounter compassion. Simple this may be, but in associating Our Lady of Guadalupe with the New Evangelization, John Paul II was recognizing how profound an effect such an approach could have.