St. Juan Diego Cuauhtlatoatzin

ARTIST: Br. Robert Lentz, OFM

ARTWORK NARRATIVE:

Ten years after the bloody Spanish conquest of Mexico, the Mother of God appeared to an Aztec craftsman named Juan Diego. She appeared as a woman with mixed Spanish and Aztec blood and addressed him in Nahuatl, the Aztec tongue, in a manner one would address a prince. She appeared some distance outside Mexico City, which had become the center of Spanish power, and she insisted that a shrine in her honor be built on that spot, among the conquered people. She sent Juan Diego back to the Spanish clergy to "evangelize" them--the ones who felt they already possessed all truth. In each of these ways, she restored dignity and hope to a native people who had been dehumanized by colonial oppression.

A shrine was later built where Mary appeared, and Juan Diego spent the remaining 17 years of his life there, repeating her message of hope and liberation to all who would come. In this icon he is dressed as an Aztec commoner, barefoot and wearing a loin cloth and short cloak. He holds a rose as a symbol of the flowers Mary sent him to pick, the morning her image appeared miraculously on his cloak. His original Nahuatl name, Cuauhtlatoatzin, means "Talking Eagle," and is included with his new Christian name to honor his native heritage.

In every age the miracle of Guadalupe should remind the Church that those the Church alienates are precisely the ones who have the gifts she needs so badly to grow and be reformed. We must each proclaim the Gospel--and hear it proclaimed from one another.

His feast day is December 9.

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St. Juan Diego Cuauhtlatoatzin (1474-1548). Little is known about the life of Juan Diego before his conversion, but tradition and archaelogical and iconographical sources, along with the most important and oldest indigenous document on the event of Guadalupe, "El Nican Mopohua" (written in Náhuatl with Latin characters, 1556, by the Indigenous writer Antonio Valeriano), give some information on the life of the saint and the apparitions.

Juan Diego was born in 1474 with the name "Cuauhtlatoatzin" ("the talking eagle") in Cuautlitlán, today part of Mexico City, Mexico. He was a gifted member of the Chichimeca people, one of the more culturally advanced groups living in the Anáhuac Valley.

When he was 50 years old he was baptized by a Franciscan priest, Fr Peter da Gand, one of the first Franciscan missionaries. On 9 December 1531, when Juan Diego was on his way to morning Mass, the Blessed Mother appeared to him on Tepeyac Hill, the outskirts of what is now Mexico City. She asked him to go to the Bishop and to request in her name that a shrine be built at Tepeyac, where she promised to pour out her grace upon those who invoked her. The Bishop, who did not believe Juan Diego, asked for a sign to prove that the apparition was true. On 12 December, Juan Diego returned to Tepeyac. Here, the Blessed Mother told him to climb the hill and to pick the flowers that he would find in bloom. He obeyed, and although it was winter time, he found roses flowering. He gathered the flowers and took them to Our Lady who carefully placed them in his mantle and told him to take them to the Bishop as "proof". When he opened his mantle, the flowers fell on the ground and there remained impressed, in place of the flowers, an image of the Blessed Mother, the apparition at Tepeyac.

With the Bishop's permission, Juan Diego lived the rest of his life as a hermit in a small hut near the chapel where the miraculous image was placed for veneration. Here he cared for the church and the first pilgrims who came to pray to the Mother of Jesus.

Much deeper than the "exterior grace" of having been "chosen" as Our Lady's "messenger", Juan Diego received the grace of interior enlightenment and from that moment, he began a life dedicated to prayer and the practice of virtue and boundless love of God and neighbour. He died in 1548 and was buried in the first chapel dedicated to the Virgin of Guadalupe. He was beatified on 6 May 1990 by Pope John Paul II in the Basilica of Santa Maria di Guadalupe, Mexico City.

The miraculous image, which is preserved in the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe, shows a woman with native features and dress. She is supported by an angel whose wings are reminiscent of one of the major gods of the traditional religion of that area. The moon is beneath her feet and her blue mantle is covered with gold stars. The black girdle about her waist signifies that she is pregnant. Thus, the image graphically depicts the fact that Christ is to be "born" again among the peoples of the New World, and is a message as relevant to the "New World" today as it was during the lifetime of Juan Diego.

Born: 1474 Tlayacac, Cuauhtitlan (about 15 miles north of modern Mexico City, Mexico) as Cuauhtlatoatzin

Died: May 30, 1548 of natural causes

Beatified: April 9, 1990 by Pope John Paul II at Vatican City; confirmed and ceremony held on May 6, 1990 at Mexico City, Mexico

Canonized: uly 31, 2002 at the basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe, Mexico by Pope John Paul II

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