Our Lady of Guadalupe, whose feast day is celebrated on December 12, is confirmed by the Church as the “Patroness of the Americas”. She first appeared on the hill of Tepeyac, Mexico in 1531 to St. Juan Diego, an indigenous peasant and convert to the Catholic faith before the Virgin appeared to him. Our Lady asked Juan to build her a shrine on the site of the apparition, “in order for Her to show and share Her love and compassion with all those who believe.”(1)

Juan Diego reported the apparition to the Spanish Bishop Juan de Zumárraga, who became Archbishop of Mexico City in 1547, and who asked for proof from Our Lady. Juan Diego returned to the hilltop, where he once again encountered Our Lady. She told him to pick flowers and to present them to Bishop Zumárraga. Despite the fact that it was winter, Juan discovered an abundance of roses in bloom in the middle of singing birds. The impossible: to have flowers and birds singing during winter time, was possible. He picked a bouquet of flowers and placed them in his cloak, known as a tilma. When Juan Diego presented the flowers, both men were amazed to discover that the image of Our Lady was miraculously imprinted on the cloak. The church that was built on the hill at Tepeyac eventually became the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe. Twenty million pilgrims visit the Basilica each year from all over the world to see the tilma and ask for the intercession of the Virgin.

In 2022 Pope Francis made a proposal to the pilgrim Church in the Americas: “I urge all members of the pilgrim Church in the Americas, pastors and faithful...to participate in this celebratory journey that aims to promote an encounter with God through Our Lady of Guadalupe, for the renewal of the social and ecclesial fabric of these peoples and communities.​​” The Mexican bishops joined the Pope’s claim and proposed a nine-year novena culminating in the 500th anniversary of the Virgin’s apparition, which will be celebrated in 2031.

So, what does it mean that Our Lady of Guadalupe is the Patroness of the Americas and the mother of all humanity? How can she help us to live our relationship with her son, Jesus?

Several years ago, Claudia Mena, an economist in Mexico, took up the task of answering these questions with a group of friends. The presentation that developed, which she offered at New York Encounter in 2023, helped to address some of these questions, as well as her own personal questions of identity.

Her presentation centered around the question “Who am I?” from an ethnic, cultural, and ontological perspective. As someone who is of mestizo descent, Claudia had long grappled with both her native Mexican and Spanish identity. The modern mentality sees these two sides as always in tension with one other. Instead, through her work on Our Lady of Guadalupe, Claudia discovered the possibility of living both aspects of her heritage in a unified way.

Claudia explained how the Virgin appeared in Mexico just over a decade after Hernán Cortés arrived with more than 600 conquistadores. The 10-year-war between the Spanish and their native-Mexican allies against the Aztecs (the dominant culture at the time), caused turmoil in all native populations (allies or not). A war always means the destruction of what so far has been created. The most important fundamentals of natives were destroyed: their religion, their beliefs, their way of living, their cities, their way of conceiving life, family, friendship, politics, everything. A later bishop wrote to Spain, indicating that a miracle was needed to save the native Mexican people from their distress. It was then that God intervened through the appearance of His mother. She appeared to Juan and spoke in Náhuatl, the Aztecs language, and offered herself as the mother of all humanity. In this way, Our Lady made possible the impossible unity of two completely different cultures. This became the starting point of a beautiful mix of ethnicity and culture that expanded first to Latin America but is also alive in all the Americas nowadays through Christianity.

For Claudia, knowing the living presence of Our Lady of Guadalupe made her realize she is a beloved daughter of the Virgin. Regarding her experience at the New York Encounter, she said: “I feel like a new Claudia in the sense that I cannot deny what I experienced. I witnessed the power of the Virgin: Our Lady’s embrace in the hearts of her American children and in my own. I witnessed the new family that we all formed by sharing each other’s life story, questions, and search. I also witnessed how each person has a very particular story through which Our Lord reaches or seeks to reach their life. It has been one of the most beautiful experiences of my life!” By discovering “the powerful and maternal embrace of the Virgin”, Claudia internalized a deep ontological reality: that she is loved.

I asked Claudia why she thought Our Lady of Guadalupe was named Patroness of the Americas, and she answered: “Because we are a continent of immigration. It does not matter if you were a first, second, third or 100th generation. We are all a mix, and we all want to find where we ultimately belong. What is our mission? Which is our country? Is it possible to be a mix and embrace all that we are? It is impossible to belong to a country, to embrace our ethnicity and our culture, if we are not first embraced. The Virgin is the mother who embraces all we are, and who guides us to find our true identity: that we are children of God. The journey to find our true identity in the arms of the Virgin is the journey to God. This is the one the Pope, the bishops and the Virgin herself are proposing to us.”

Claudia and her friends in the Guadalupe group (called Tierra Florida – Flowery land) invite you to join them in this work by emailing mitierraflorida@gmail.com.

(1) Merlo, F. (2018, December 11). The Story of Our Lady of Guadalupe. Vatican News. https://www.vaticannews.va/en/church/news/2018-12/our-lady-of-guadaloupe-feast-day-mexico-americas.html