A Novena to Our Lady of Guadalupe
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Juan Diego
The Novena Prayer
Our Lady of Guadalupe, Mystical Rose, make intercession for the Holy Church, protect the Sovereign Pontiff, help all those who invoke you in their necessities, and since you are the ever Virgin Mary and Mother of the true God, obtain for us from your most holy Son the grace of keeping our faith, sweet hope in the midst of the bitterness of life, burning charity, and the precious gift of final perseverance.
The visionary at the center of the story was a Nahua convert named Cuauhtlatoatzin, baptized Juan Diego, a smallholder in his fifties from the town of Cuauhtitlan, near the hill called Tepeyac outside Mexico City.
The First Apparition
The Novena Prayer
Our Lady of Guadalupe, Mystical Rose, make intercession for the Holy Church, protect the Sovereign Pontiff, help all those who invoke you in their necessities, and since you are the ever Virgin Mary and Mother of the true God, obtain for us from your most holy Son the grace of keeping our faith, sweet hope in the midst of the bitterness of life, burning charity, and the precious gift of final perseverance.
On December 9, 1531, on his way to Mass, Juan Diego reported that a woman appeared to him on the slope of Tepeyac, speaking Nahuatl and identifying herself as the Mother of God, with instructions that a church be built on the site.
The Bishop's Sign
The Novena Prayer
Our Lady of Guadalupe, Mystical Rose, make intercession for the Holy Church, protect the Sovereign Pontiff, help all those who invoke you in their necessities, and since you are the ever Virgin Mary and Mother of the true God, obtain for us from your most holy Son the grace of keeping our faith, sweet hope in the midst of the bitterness of life, burning charity, and the precious gift of final perseverance.
Juan Diego carried the request to Juan de Zumarraga, the first bishop of Mexico, who received him politely but asked for a sign before he would act on the word of an indigenous convert with no standing to bring such a message.
The Uncle's Illness
The Novena Prayer
Our Lady of Guadalupe, Mystical Rose, make intercession for the Holy Church, protect the Sovereign Pontiff, help all those who invoke you in their necessities, and since you are the ever Virgin Mary and Mother of the true God, obtain for us from your most holy Son the grace of keeping our faith, sweet hope in the midst of the bitterness of life, burning charity, and the precious gift of final perseverance.
On December 12, Juan Diego was hurrying past Tepeyac on an errand for his dying uncle, Juan Bernardino, when the apparition met him again. She told him his uncle was already healed, which the accounts say he was.
The Tilma
The Novena Prayer
Our Lady of Guadalupe, Mystical Rose, make intercession for the Holy Church, protect the Sovereign Pontiff, help all those who invoke you in their necessities, and since you are the ever Virgin Mary and Mother of the true God, obtain for us from your most holy Son the grace of keeping our faith, sweet hope in the midst of the bitterness of life, burning charity, and the precious gift of final perseverance.
On that same 12 December, sent to gather Castilian roses from the frozen hillside, Juan Diego carried them down in his cloak, a tilma of coarse maguey fiber. When he opened it before the bishop, the flowers fell out and an image of the woman remained printed on the cloth.
A Cloak Kept Nearly Five Centuries
The Novena Prayer
Our Lady of Guadalupe, Mystical Rose, make intercession for the Holy Church, protect the Sovereign Pontiff, help all those who invoke you in their necessities, and since you are the ever Virgin Mary and Mother of the true God, obtain for us from your most holy Son the grace of keeping our faith, sweet hope in the midst of the bitterness of life, burning charity, and the precious gift of final perseverance.
That tilma is preserved today behind glass at the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe at the foot of Tepeyac, an ordinary cactus-fiber garment that was expected to disintegrate within a few decades and has instead outlasted nearly five centuries.
Patroness of New Spain
The Novena Prayer
Our Lady of Guadalupe, Mystical Rose, make intercession for the Holy Church, protect the Sovereign Pontiff, help all those who invoke you in their necessities, and since you are the ever Virgin Mary and Mother of the true God, obtain for us from your most holy Son the grace of keeping our faith, sweet hope in the midst of the bitterness of life, burning charity, and the precious gift of final perseverance.
In 1754, Pope Benedict XIV formally named Our Lady of Guadalupe patroness of New Spain, giving papal recognition to a devotion that had already shaped the religious life of the region for more than two hundred years.
Empress of the Americas
The Novena Prayer
Our Lady of Guadalupe, Mystical Rose, make intercession for the Holy Church, protect the Sovereign Pontiff, help all those who invoke you in their necessities, and since you are the ever Virgin Mary and Mother of the true God, obtain for us from your most holy Son the grace of keeping our faith, sweet hope in the midst of the bitterness of life, burning charity, and the precious gift of final perseverance.
Pope Pius X named her patroness of Latin America in 1910, and Pope Pius XII gave her the title Empress of the Americas in 1945, extending a local Mexican devotion into a patronage claimed across an entire hemisphere.
Juan Diego Canonized
The Novena Prayer
Our Lady of Guadalupe, Mystical Rose, make intercession for the Holy Church, protect the Sovereign Pontiff, help all those who invoke you in their necessities, and since you are the ever Virgin Mary and Mother of the true God, obtain for us from your most holy Son the grace of keeping our faith, sweet hope in the midst of the bitterness of life, burning charity, and the precious gift of final perseverance.
Juan Diego himself was beatified in 1990 and canonized in 2002, both by Pope John Paul II, becoming the first Indigenous saint of the Americas, four hundred and seventy-one years after the events at Tepeyac.
The prayer that opens each day is the traditional indulgenced prayer to Our Lady of Guadalupe (Our Lady of Guadalupe, Mystical Rose…), of unknown authorship and long printed in Catholic prayer books; it is given here as it is commonly printed. What follows each day is a fact about the apparition, the tilma, or the devotion's own history, one per day, drawn from the Nican Mopohua, the sixteenth-century Nahuatl narrative, and from the later history of the devotion.
