December 12: Christ Comes to the Americas 2025
Today the Church calls “Our Lady of Guadalupe,” but special feasts are always first about Jesus Christ our Redeemer, no matter what the official title of the day. The historical fact on which today’s festival is based starts with the Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés, who in 1519 was commissioned to explore the mainland of Mexico. He led a small band of Spanish soldiers, who with much help from indigenous people overthrew the Aztec nation. They were motivated by gold and glory but also served the greater good of preparing the area for Catholic missionaries, mostly Franciscans.
The result of their missionary work among the indigenous people? Utter failure. The people of Mexico had been tyrannized by the Aztec rulers and their bloodthirsty so-called “gods.” They did not see the Spanish as liberators and saw too much evidence that they had only traded one tyrant for another. The number of conversions to Christ and His Church was pitifully small.
And then in December of 1531, one of God’s miracles happened. A poor convert who took the name Juan Diego, after St. John the Evangelist and St. James, saw a lady on the hill of Tepeyac. It was the feast of the Immaculate Conception of Mary. In the course of their conversations, the woman pointed out roses growing on the hillside and instructed Juan Diego to take them to the local bishop. He looked and there they were, growing beautiful completely out of season. He gathered the roses into his tunic, his rude “tilma,” and took them to the bishop and his associates. When he dropped the tilma to allow the roses to fall out, the bishop and everyone else fell to their knees. The image of the woman, who was Mary, Mother of Jesus, had appeared on the tilma. The visible band of pregnancy was around her middle, so the true focus of the image is her Son, the Son of God. It remains visible even today, half a millennium later.
The result of this undeniably miraculous event was the conversion of millions of natives in Mexico. Devotion to Our Lady of Guadalupe extends throughout the Americas. This was the medium by which devotion to Christ spread through the indigenous populations of the continents.
There is a long-time devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary which is rooted in Scripture. St. Irenaeus contrasted Mary, the Second Eve like Jesus was the Second Adam, with Eve, who began tying the knot of sin around the human race. Mary is invoked under the title “Undoer of Knots.” The story we all may be acquainted with is of Zechariah and Elizabeth, parents of John the Baptist. Zechariah was a priest and in the temple when he had a vision of an angel telling him that he and his wife would become parents at their advanced age. Elizabeth would bear a son who would live as a Nazarite prophet for Israel. Zechariah foolishly asked how he would know that was truth, and the angel applied an appropriate remedy for his unbelief: he was mute for the next nine months, until he wrote “John is his name” on a tablet for the boy’s circumcision rite. A little math applied to the early chapters of Luke’s Gospel will demonstrate that Mary was present at John’s birth. Her presence was associated with the untying of Zechariah’s tongue.
Similarly, Mary’s miraculous presence in Mexico broke the logjam keeping the culture from accepting Jesus Christ and the Church. The conversion to Christian faith then broke the power of the Aztec priests and gods, and the ending of child sacrifice. For this reason, the Virgin of Guadalupe is venerated as patroness of the unborn child.
