Catalina Mónica Xuárez de Moisen was a native of Cuautitlán, traditionally considered the hometown of St. Juan Diego. She was reportedly 100 years old in 1666 when church officials from Mexico City interviewed her as part of an inquiry to seek papal recognition and promulgation of a liturgical feast for a popular local religious celebration. Testifying through Nahuatl-Spanish interpreters, she imparted various facets of Native devotion, revealing distinct Indigenous contributions to the local tradition.
That tradition was the veneration of Our Lady of Guadalupe, and the history of the apparition, devotion and eventual widespread popularity of Our Lady of Guadalupe is now inextricably bound up with that of Mexico, North America and indeed the global church.
Xuárez de Moisen recounted that from a young age her parents and aunt had initiated her into the family practice of visiting the Guadalupe chapel at Tepeyac (in present-day Mexico City). This modest chapel was near the site of Our Lady of Guadalupe’s reported appearances to Juan Diego, whom she sent to request that Bishop Juan de Zumárraga build a church where she could bestow her love on her children.
Like other witnesses from Cuautitlán, Xuárez de Moisen related her family memory of Indigenous devotees who “asked Juan Diego to intercede for them with [her, who is] the Queen of Heaven and the Mother of God.” While members of the clergy had previously proposed Juan Diego as a model of holiness for their Indigenous charges, Cuautitlán witnesses like Xuárez de Moisen were the first to approach Juan Diego as an intercessory figure, one whose connection with Guadalupe made his prayer intentions particularly efficacious.
Xuárez de Moisen spoke of a local devotion that gradually grew among Natives and Spaniards, and subsequently among their mixed-race and criollo (a person of Spanish background born in the New World) descendants. By the 1550s, Spanish devotees had developed the practice of Sunday afternoon visits to the Guadalupe chapel on the outskirts of New Spain’s capital of Mexico City (the metropolis has since grown past and around the shrine). One devotee noted that the stream of women and men, the healthy and the infirm, who went to pray, attend Mass and hear sermons at the shrine was so continuous it induced young children to “agitate [their elders] to take them there.”
Local Devotion
Residents of the small settlement around the Guadalupe shrine on the hill of Tepeyac some three miles north of the city center were all Indigenous save for the resident chaplain, though devotees of all backgrounds attested to cures and other miracles received through Our Lady of Guadalupe’s intercession. Consequently, they propagated the Guadalupe cult through their patronage of new facilities and construction projects at Tepeyac. By the early 17th century, Guadalupe’s faithful conducted separate fiesta seasons over successive weeks at Tepeyac, with Native celebrations one week and those of Spaniards, criollos and castas (those of mixed race) the other.
Significantly, however, during the 16th century, the Guadalupe devotion was a decidedly local one within the environs of Mexico City, a place of numerous shrines and miraculous images that emerged in colonial New Spain. For nearly a century after the traditional date of the Guadalupe apparitions (1531), the central place of worship at the Guadalupe shrine at Tepeyac was an occasionally enhanced but still relatively modest chapel. Moreover, there were no other known churches, altars, convents, schools or institutions named for Our Lady of Guadalupe in nearby Mexico City or beyond.
It was not until the era of Mexican independence, some 300 years after the apparitions, that the veneration of Our Lady of Guadalupe permeated the former territories of New Spain. In broad strokes, the Guadalupe tradition was established locally in Mexico City and the environs during the 16th century and grew to regional prominence in the 17th century. Our Lady of Guadalupe became the patroness of the entire viceroyalty of New Spain in the 18th century, was acclaimed as the national symbol of the newly formed Mexican nation in the 19th century and evolved into the object of international devotion in the 20th and 21st centuries.
Projecting Into the Past
Most devotees and more than a few scholars continue to project the Guadalupe devotion’s national and international acclaim back into the 16th century, an anachronism that conflicts with the fact that Guadalupan devotion was then confined to the area around Mexico City. This tempting anachronism distorts our understanding of the Guadalupe tradition.
At stake is not merely the accuracy of the historical record. Examining the theological, ecclesiastical, devotional, political, social and other factors that shaped the rise of Guadalupan devotion from local to global prominence provides an essential roadmap for assessing the meanings of Guadalupe in particular communities and across time and place.
One example of the tendency to project Guadalupe’s present impact back into the past can be found in claims about Native conversions to Christianity in the early years of the devotion. The writings of Fray Toribio de Benavente, or Motolinía, one of the original Franciscan “Twelve Apostles” in New Spain, provide the most frequently cited example.
Writing in 1536, just five years after the date for the Guadalupe apparitions, Motolinía estimated that Franciscans had already baptized at least nine million Natives. However, Motolinía’s figure is an approximation based on two sets of data: the number of locales where collective baptisms had occurred and the number of Franciscan priests engaged in administering the sacrament of baptism—estimating some 100,000 baptisms per priest. Moreover, the estimate is for the 15-year period from 1521 to 1536, with no clear delineation of how many baptisms occurred after the 1531 date for the Guadalupe apparitions.
Most important, while Motolinía noted that voluntary Native practice of Christianity had recently increased in a time frame that coincided with the 1531 date, particularly in their rejection of polygamy and embrace of Christian marriage, he did not mention Our Lady of Guadalupe as a key factor in Native conversion. Indeed, in his lengthy historical treatise, Motolinía did not mention the Guadalupe apparitions, a chapel dedicated to her at Tepeyac or even Guadalupan devotion.
Historical Record
If the devotion to Our Lady of Guadalupe inspired millions of conversions, including entire towns, it is difficult to explain why there is no record of a single church, altar or reproduction of her image outside of Tepeyac in the rest of the 16th century, nor any recorded recollections of her role in conversions from known sources, especially from Motolinía and other priests who administered the baptisms.
Moreover, the claims of a miraculous concentration of baptisms occlude the fundamental dynamic of Native life in the wake of conquest, which was not mass conversions but instead demographic collapse. While there were certainly impressive numbers of baptisms, sometimes during epidemics when Natives were in grave danger of death, European diseases simultaneously devastated Indigenous populations.
In the case of central Mexico, the most drastic contagion following the arrival of Europeans was an epidemic in 1545-48 that wiped out at least 60 percent of Native residents. A subsequent epidemic in 1576-80 diminished the Nahua population to scarcely 10 percent of their number on the eve of the conquest. For Native peoples, addressing such rampant death was surely one of the core elements of whatever religious faith or rituals they practiced in the aftermath of the Spanish takeover of their civilization.
The Birth of Native Christianity
Our Lady of Guadalupe was undoubtedly a paradoxical figure for Indigenous peoples in colonial society. Even as Native population demographics gradually rebounded beginning in the 17th century, the Guadalupe devotion was a tool with which Spaniards and criollos engaged to enhance Native peoples’ acceptance of colonial rule and missionary efforts, a protagonist in the Catholic efforts to displace Indigenous ways.
At the same time, Our Lady of Guadalupe was a mother and intercessor invoked by Natives such as Xuárez de Moisen, a brown-skinned woman like them who provided continuity with an ancient Native worship site. She worked miracles that to some extent alleviated the suffering of supplicants amid the devastating effects of conquest and European diseases. From community to community—and even from person to person—Natives adapted Spanish Catholic practices and the symbolic world they mediated in accordance with their own life situations.
Thus, over time, Our Lady of Guadalupe became a central figure in the efforts of Native Catholics to respond with faith to the crisis of their everyday lives. The 16th century is best characterized as an epoch not of majestic Native conversion but instead of the painful birth of Nahua Christianity. Intentionally or not, glamorized portrayals of mass conversions can erase from the Guadalupe tradition the legacy of Native people’s faith amid indescribable suffering.
In no way does such a historical analysis of the earliest Guadalupan sources nullify or diminish Guadalupe’s importance. On the contrary, recognizing that the devotion began in local communities among those on the peripheries of colonial society underscores the marvelous ways that God’s saving love is revealed. Like Jesus’ resurrection appearances—his personal encounters with disciples whose proclamation of the Gospel initiated a nascent movement that catalyzed faith across the globe—the foundational Guadalupan encounters with Juan Diego and other early devotees set in motion a living tradition of faith that in time inspired millions.
No Cheap Grace
The strength of the early church was in the radical conversion of the first believers in Christ, many to the point of martyrdom, not in an overwhelming number of conversions. Similarly, Our Lady of Guadalupe transformed the lives of Juan Diego and other devotees. Far from minimizing Guadalupe’s impact, understanding her relations with devotees such as Catalina Mónica Xuárez de Moisen illuminates the beauty of her evangelizing presence, both then and now. From those humble origins, Our Lady of Guadalupe kindled the faith of an entire nation. Over time, she did the same beyond Mexico—in the entire hemisphere and the global church.
Yet even a casual observer can see that Our Lady of Guadalupe’s hope and her call to evangelize are scarcely beginning to dawn. Some might wonder if in fact we have gone backward in the American hemisphere since the Guadalupe tradition began nearly 500 years ago, or even since the death and resurrection of Christ nearly 2,000 years ago. We live in a time of venomous polarization, both in the church and in our nation, and we are facing wars, the ongoing impact of clerical sex abuse, the often-disastrous influences of social media, abortion, capital punishment, poverty, climate change, displaced peoples and a host of other challenges, both collective and personal. This is not a time to offer cheap grace or happily-ever-after piety.
Our Lady of Guadalupe is not a fairy tale of a bygone era of evangelical and ecclesiastical triumph. She is our mother and, in the words of the English translation of the “Salve Regina,” “our life, our sweetness, and our hope,” just as she was for those first Native devotees in the 16th century.
Guadalupe’s hope impels us to evangelizing action. As Pope Francis proclaimed in his 2016 homily at Tepeyac, “On that morning, at that meeting, God awakened the hope of his son Juan, and the hope of a people.” Like Juan Diego in his moments of doubt, however, we face “many situations which leave us powerless, which make us feel that there is no room for hope, for change, for transformation.” Yet our response must be bold, the pope continued, as he commissioned his hearers to be the Juan Diego harbingers of hope today: “Today, she sends us out anew; as she did Juancito.”
Speaking in the name of Our Lady of Guadalupe, Pope Francis urged all her faithful to “Go and build my shrine, help me to lift up the lives of my sons and daughters, who are your brothers and sisters.”
Our Lady of Guadalupe simultaneously gives devotees a reason for hope and is a poignant reminder that, as a popular saying goes, la vida es la lucha (“life is struggle”). She is hope that we are never abandoned. The drama of Juan Diego and Bishop Juan de Zumárraga reveals a divine plan in which the humanity and dignity of the lowly are restored, injustice is set aright, strangers become friends, enemies are reconciled, evangelization flourishes within local cultures, and the love of a common mother incites mutual respect and harmony.
Yet the countless appeals and cries to her for intercessory help remind us that the final resolution of this drama still needs to be realized in our personal lives, families and communities. Like our Catholic faith itself, Our Lady of Guadalupe is not a magical remedy for all of life’s ills. But her maternal love reminds us that we never have to face our travails alone, and that our desolations in this world must always be understood within the horizon of eternity. She enables us to confront the sinfulness of the world as it is with prophetic action and confident hope in the world as it will be in God’s saving plan.
A Feast and a Future
Devotion to Our Lady of Guadalupe and the celebration of her feast are graced occasions to deepen our faith and our response to the call to conversion and Christian discipleship. As the bishops of Mexico stated in their objective for the nine-year Novena Intercontinental Guadalupana they are leading to prepare for the Guadalupan quincentenary in 2031, we are called to encounter God anew through Holy Mary of Guadalupe and to forge “new pathways in the reconstruction of the social and ecclesial fabric of our peoples and communities.”
The objectives of ecclesial renewal, social action and spiritual encounter through Our Lady of Guadalupe are also proclaimed in the recent pastoral plan from the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, “One Tilma, One Heart: Walking With Our Lady of Guadalupe in the Footsteps of Saint Juan Diego.”
Guadalupan preaching and evangelization do not need to make hyperbolic claims that romanticize Our Lady of Guadalupe and detach her from the messiness of our lives and our world. We will be more faithful to her message if we focus on her encounters with her sons and daughters, beginning with Juan Diego, that transformed them—and transform us—into missionary disciples.
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