Overview:

The Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe

A Reflection for the Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe

A great sign appeared in the sky, a woman clothed with the sun,
with the moon under her feet,
and on her head a crown of twelve stars.

Find today’s readings here.

Revisiting the story of Our Lady of Guadalupe’s apparitions to Juan Diego today, I’m struck by one wrinkle in the story: On the day Juan Diego was meant to visit the hill of Tepeyac to finally get proof for his archbishop that it really was Mary he was seeing, Juan Diego’s uncle fell sick. He missed his appointment with Mary. The next day, as Juan Diego was rushing to find a priest to give his uncle Last Rites, Mary appeared to him, assured him his uncle was healed, and gently chided him for standing her up: “Am I not here, your Mother?”

It’s immediately after this that Mary, according to pious legend, made roses bloom from the ground and arranged them in Juan Diego’s tilma—which would later fall out to reveal the miraculous image of La Guadalupana to the archbishop.

This detail of the story provides some hope for those of us who are chronically busy—which is, perhaps, all of us this time of year. When we are (or think we are) too busy for prayer, Mary has two messages for us: First, that she is our mother, and thus should be a priority, and second, that, like a mother, she will not give up on us. She will keep coming back to our Tepeyacs.

But perhaps, for those of us preoccupied with a million other things, Mary’s greatest spiritual lesson to us is the grace of letting herself be interrupted: In her case, by an angel asking her to be the mother of the Messiah.  As Catholic writer Cameron Bellm writes in Entering the Night of Peace: Reflections for Advent and Christmas 2025, published by Pax Christi USA, Mary asks us, like she asked Juan Diego, to allow ourselves to be interrupted by grace:

Mary keeps coming back to Tepeyac, more than willing to meet Juan Diego in his confusion and doubt. And the same is true for us today. Aren’t we all rushing over our own Tepeyac this holiday season? There are gifts to buy, special meals to cook, holiday gatherings to plan. And yet the voice of our Mother calls to us, ordinary though we may feel. We have great callings to answer, perhaps not once and for all, but over and over again, right in the middle of our busy, everyday lives.

Our Lady of Guadalupe was an important symbol for ordinary mestizo people seeking to reconcile their Aztec and Spanish identities in New Spain in 1531. She appeared as an ordinary mestiza woman, clothed in biblical imagery and speaking Nahuatl, Juan Diego’s native Aztec language. She was there in the ordinariness of his life.

Yet in appearing in this ordinariness, she became the most recognizable image of the Mexican people. In 2022, Pope Francis said this about where Mary continues to appear in ordinary life in the Americas:

Today, as yesterday, Our Lady of Guadalupe wants to encounter us, just as one day she encountered Juan Diego on the little hill of Tepeyac. She wants to remain with us. She begs us to allow her to be our mother, to open our lives to her Son Jesus, and to receive her message so that we may learn to love as He does.

She came to accompany the American people on this very difficult path marked by poverty, exploitation, and socio-economic and cultural colonialisms. She is in the midst of the caravans that, seeking freedom and well-being, travel northward. She is in the midst of that American people whose identity is threatened by a savage, exploitative paganism, wounded by the active preaching of a practical and pragmatic atheism. And she is there. ‘I am your Mother,’ she tells us, the Mother of the love through whom we live.

Colleen Dulle is the Vatican Correspondent at America and co-hosts the "Inside the Vatican" podcast. She is the author of Struck Down, Not Destroyed: Keeping the Faith as a Vatican Reporter (Image, 2025).