December 12 is the feast day of La Virgen de Guadalupe, observed all over the Latino world. On the rocky land outside Mexico City in 1531, she sent winter flowers as a sign to a New World messenger.
The Virgin of Guadalupe, a brown skinned Mary who made herself known four and a half centuries ago, is especially adored today. In Los Angeles alone, there will be 11 masses at the church named for her.
Her major shrine is the basilica in Mexico City, receiving some 10 millions pilgrims every year. It’s “the most popular Marian shrine in the world, and the most visited Catholic church in the world next to the Vatican.” There, in Los Angeles, here in Austin, and everywhere, the Virgin of Guadalupe is honored with flowers, and for good reason.
In the hills outside Mexico, the story goes, she appeared to a devout but very simple fellow named Juan Diego, asking him to tell the Roman Catholic leaders to build a church. The Spanish bishops listened politely but didn’t quite take the barefoot farmer’s word on all this. To set them straight, the Virgin had flowers miraculously bloom in the desert caliche and instructed Juan Diego to gather them in his cloak to show the clergy.
When Juan Diego made his revelation, the authorities were shocked to see flowers—blooming out of season—and as if this weren’t proof enough, an image of the Virgin had somehow been emblazoned on Juan Diego’s tilma.
South Texas florists have told me that roses are the flower especially dedicated to Our Lady of Guadalupe, and the services and altars I’ve seen bear this out. (One of the big mail-order companies even features a “Virgin of Guadalupe” rose).
So I was interested to read this translation of the Nican Mopohua, the 17th century document written in Juan Diego’s native Nahuatl language that’s, so far as I know, the earliest recounting of the story.
Here Mary directs Juan Diego to look, not for roses, but for all sorts of flowers in bloom. And so he does, stumbling out into the winter desert to see “flowers of every kind, lovely and beautiful, when it still was not their season: because really that was the season in which the frost was very harsh.”
It’s a mild day here in Austin today, a lot farther north than Juan Diego lived. A mediocre gardener, even I have hyacinth bean, chrysanthemum, lantana, plumbago, even a few roses in bloom.
It may not have been so miraculous that Juan Diego found wildflowers to pick in mid-December, but it was miraculous that he spoke with conviction and authority to the colonial Roman church leaders, and that eventually they listened.
Contemporary theologian Virgilio Elizondo, a native of San Antonio, has written about the Virgin of Guadalupe, “She revealed both a loving God and the God-given dignity of the Indian people. Her coming marks the turning point in the sixteenth-century history of Latin America. Juan Diego heeded Mary’s call to proclaim the word of God even against powerful obstacles of disbelief and discrimination against his people. From one rejected and silenced we draw strength and courage.”
Special roses? Exclusively roses? “Virgin of Guadalupe” roses? The Mexican Mary is smiling mildly at us all.
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