Dear St. Rita Families,
This week we celebrated the Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe, the first of the 3 major Marian apparitions. From December 9-12, 1531, she appeared several times to St. Juan Diego, a 50-year-old Native American and convert to Catholicism. Juan was on his way to Mass early in the morning in a neighboring village, when he heard the voice of a woman calling his name. Climbing up the hill where he heard the voice coming from, he discovered a beautiful woman, who introduced herself as “the ever perfect Holy Virgin Mary…Mother of the one true God.” You know the rest of the story, which comes from the Nican Mopohua (meaning “Here is told”), written down sometime before the death of St. Juan Diego in 1548.
This apparition of Our Lady, which makes reference to the woman (clothed with the sun) of Revelation 12, is much more than just a mythic, cultural expression of faith that requires mariachis at 5 AM once a year. (Although, if you didn’t come to our serenata this year, you missed out!) Our Lady’s apparition at Tepeyac Hill is a lesson in God’s presence through Mary, in inculturation, and in the Christian life of the laity.
On the one hand, God’s presence among us is quite a well-known and believed truth. The world knows that it can invoke God whenever and wherever it recognizes the need. The truth is even used, sadly to permit a certain complacency – God is here anyways, so I am free even to sin. On the other hand, God’s presence among us as more than idea, as a real, tangible presence, is a truth deeply astounding and moving for us, when its full import is recognized. Mary’s apparition, her tender words of affection to St. Juan Diego, her assurances of her motherly presence and care, and of course the miraculous tilma still on display at the Basilica at Guadalupe were more than mythical ideas trying to express the faith of a peasant. They were and are a Marian Gospel, where the Mother of Jesus makes a splash on the world stage, making her presence felt and known. And the tilma with its miraculously drawn image is itself something of a Marian Eucharist – not literally a Real Presence of Mary, but certainly a lasting, tangible image of her presence as Mother. Her words to St. Juan Diego still ring out through the centuries, “Am I not here, I who am your Mother?” And because she is present, He is present. Even though the image is of Mary, the woman clothed with the sun does not eclipse Our Lord. In the Guadalupe apparitions, Mary is pregnant. Her arrival on the scene, then, is a precursor of the imminent arrival of Our Lord Himself.
Mary’s inculturation of the Gospel for the Native St. Juan Diego is an aspect of this apparition that cannot be dismissed. If sometimes, good-willed evangelizers are accused of using the Gospel as a sledgehammer, Mary’s apparitions at Tepeyac are just the opposite – and with upwards of 15 million converts in the several years after the events on Tepeyac, we see the effectiveness of Mary’s method over our own! Mary appears as a mestiza girl, wearing native dress and covered in native symbolism.[i] She enters seamlessly into the culture of the Natives and deposits Christ there, coming up for air unscathed. In other words, not only does she place Christ squarely in the center of all that the Native culture held dear, she is also untouched by anything in the culture contrary to Christ. (She is, after all, Immaculate.) But Mary does not “deposit” Christ into the culture as if He were a foreign entity. She presents Him precisely as fulfillment of all that the Natives hoped for and waited for. It was this presentation that resonated deeply within them, allowing them to fully embrace the religion coming from the Old World without rejecting who God had made them to be. This type of inculturation of the Gospel is a model for our evangelization, as well. Knowing that God has prepared all things beforehand, to discover the gems, small and large, that He has placed in each culture as beacons to lead them to Himself, should be high on the list of everyone who wants to engage in the apostolate.
St. Juan Diego, the first recipient of Mary’s enculturated proclamations, was only canonized fairly recently (2002), and the fact that he was raised to the altar only (finally) in this millennium is an indication of his importance for our time. In contrast to St. Bernadette to whom Mary appeared at Lourdes, France and Venerable Sr. Lucia who was one of the Fatima visionaries, St. Juan Diego did not enter the religious life (nor the priesthood). Juan Diego seems just to have continued his simple, faithful devotion to Our Lord and to Our Lady. For his whole life. In him, we see how the role of the laity cannot be underestimated. Not only is sanctity possible in the lay state, but it is what every single Christian is made for. Likewise, every single Christian has an apostolic mission to bring holiness into the places that God puts them. Like St. John Vianney who wanted to put the love of God into the little town of Ars where he ministered, and St. Maximillian Kolbe who brought a little bit of Heaven into the hell of Auschwitz, each lay member of Christ’s faithful flock shines the light of Christ into the darkness around them and seasons with supernatural outlook the bland fare of malaise that is consumed by the lovers of the world. And like St. Juan Diego, the Christian does this by his simple fidelity to Our Lord and Our Lady. Juan wasn’t a “somebody” before Our Lady appeared to him, and afterwards he didn’t acquire new skills or go on to do other great things in the Church and the world. He was just faithful.
In Christ,
Fr. Christensen
[i] See Carl Anderson’s and Msgr. Eduardo Chavez’ Our Lady of Guadalupe, Mother of the Civilization of Love for many of the ways in which Mary directed native culture to its proper end in Christ.