Saint Juan Diego

That humble man was Saint Juan Diego — Cuauhtlatoatzin — the first indigenous saint of the Americas. The mysterious meeting between him and Our Lady of Guadalupe set off the greatest wave of conversions in human history: in less than a decade, more than nine million native people freely entered the waters of Baptism, reconciling two hostile cultures and opening a new chapter for the Americas.

The couple received Baptism, taking the Christian names Juan Diego and María Lucía. They lived a holy married life, practicing chastity and devoting themselves to works of charity. In 1529 his wife died, and Juan Diego moved to live with his elderly uncle Juan Bernardino in Tolpetlac, walking dozens of kilometers every day to go to Mass and serve the poor.

Juan Diego obeyed at once and ran to the bishop’s residence. But the Spanish bishop and the clergy of his household looked at the ragged native man with suspicion. The bishop listened half-heartedly, then advised him to go home and rest, promising to consider the matter later. That afternoon, back on the hill of Tepeyac and seeing Our Lady still waiting, Juan Diego fell to his knees in anguish and pleaded: “My Lady, my gentle Mother... I am only a poor peasant, a dry leaf, a frayed rope of no value at all... No one will believe what I say! Please send some nobleman whose word carries weight, and then people will listen to you!” But Our Lady smiled at him lovingly and answered:

“My dear son, I have many great people I could send; yet it is God’s holy will and mine that you yourself — in your littleness and humility — should be the one to carry out this mission!”

The next day, Sunday, December 10, Juan Diego patiently went to the bishop’s residence a second time. This time, after questioning him closely, Bishop Zumárraga told him to ask the Lady for a clear sign from heaven as proof. That afternoon, Our Lady promised to give him the sign the following morning.

Our Lady told Juan Diego to climb to the top of the hill of Tepeyac and pick the flowers blooming there to bring to her. The top of Tepeyac was a barren limestone outcrop, full of thorns, and it was the middle of a freezing, frosty December. But when he reached the top, Juan Diego was stunned to see a whole garden of fresh, exquisite Castilian roses in bloom, fragrant with the morning dew — noble roses found only in faraway Spain, which could never grow on Mexican soil in the middle of winter. He picked those roses and carefully wrapped them in the fold of his tilma to carry down. Our Lady arranged each flower in his cloak with her own hands, tied the two corners of the cloak together and said:

“Take this bundle of flowers and place it in the Bishop’s own hands; this is my sign!”

That tilma — an ordinary piece of rough plant-fiber cloth that would normally rot away within twenty years at most — has miraculously survived intact for nearly five hundred years, without fading or decaying, despite the damp climate and the smoke of millions of pilgrims’ candles over the centuries. On November 14, 1921, an employee of the Mexican President’s office named Luciano Pérez Carpio hid a bomb in a vase of flowers right beneath the image, plotting to destroy the whole basilica. The blast was heard a kilometer away, shattering the windows, destroying the marble altar rail, and twisting a bronze crucifix nearby — still preserved today under the name “the Christ of the Bomb”. But the glass protecting the image of Our Lady, right above the bomb, was not even scratched.

The most advanced scientific and ophthalmological studies of the twentieth century all confirmed with astonishment that the surface of the image bears no trace of any human brushstroke or chemical pigment at all; and that the pupils of Our Lady’s eyes reflect tiny, precise images of Juan Diego, Bishop Zumárraga and the witnesses present in the room that day.