Procession at 6 PM
Rosary at 6:30 PM
Juan Diego at 7 PM
Mesa/Eucharist at 7:30 PM
Convivio at 8:30 PM
What is the background for the Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe?
The year was 1531. Juan Diego, who lived in poverty on the edge of a city called Tenochtitlan, known today as Mexico City, was on his way to Mass when he saw a woman surrounded by a halo of light. Songbirds sang as he gazed at her. She told him that she was Mary - and that she was there to let the world know that she was the protector “of all people of every kind,” acknowledging his poverty and indigenous ancestry. She told him that she wanted a temple built in her honor at that location where a temple to the Aztec goddess Tonatzin had once stood.
Juan Diego went to the Spanish bishop, who dismissed him and his story. So he went back to find the Virgin to ask her to find a more prominent person to accomplish her request. But she told him that he was the one. He went back to the bishop who again refused to listen to him. When Mary visited Juan Diego, she placed hundreds of picked spring roses into his cloak. When Juan Diego went before the bishop, this enormous pile of roses fell from his cloak onto the bishop's floor, and Mary's likeness appeared on the cloak, imprinted on the rough fabric. With the bishop believing the miracle, the temple was built and Juan Diego’s now threadbare smock hangs in the Basilica of Guadalupe in Mexico City.
When people say “La Virgen” in Mexico, it is this vision of Mary they mean. You will see figures of Mary wearing a robe spangled with stars, surrounded by a golden nimbus. She usually has black ribbons at her wrists, a sign of her pregnancy. Dark-skinned Juan Diego is pictured venerating Mary at her feet, who is also pictured as dark-skinned. As one of them, she loves the poor and those who are of no value in the eyes of the world.
