Our Lady of Guadalupe (Spanish: Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe), also known as the Virgin of Guadalupe (Spanish: Virgen de Guadalupe) and as La Virgen Morena, is a Catholic title of the Blessed Virgin Mary associated with four Marian apparitions to Juan Diego and one to his uncle Juan Bernardino reported in December 1531, when the Mexican territories were part of the Spanish Empire.
A venerated image on a cloak (tilmahtli) associated with the apparition is enshrined in the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico City.
Pope Leo XIII granted a decree of canonical coronation for the image on 8 February 1887. The rite of coronation was executed by the former Archbishop of Mexico, Próspero Alarcón y Sánchez de la Barquera on 12 October 1895. Pope Paul VI raised the shrine to the status of Minor Basilica via his Pontifical decree titled Sacra illa Ædes on 6 October 1976. It is the most-visited Catholic shrine in the world, and the world's third most-visited sacred site.
Description of Marian apparitions
According to the Nican Mopohua, included in the 17th-century Huei tlamahuiçoltica, written in Nahuatl, the Virgin Mary appeared four times to Juan Diego, a Chichimec peasant, and once to his uncle, Juan Bernardino. The first apparition occurred on the morning of Saturday, December 9, 1531 (Julian calendar, which is December 19 on the (proleptic) Gregorian calendar in present use). Juan Diego experienced a vision of a young woman at a place called the Hill of Tepeyac, which later became part of Villa de Guadalupe, in a suburb of Mexico City.
According to the accounts, the woman, speaking to Juan Diego in Nahuatl, his first language and the language of the former Aztec Empire, identified herself as the Mary, "mother of the very true deity". She was said to have asked for a church to be erected at that site in her honor.
Based on her words, Juan Diego then sought the Archbishop of Mexico City, Juan de Zumárraga, to tell him what had happened. Not unexpectedly, the Archbishop did not believe Juan Diego. Later the same day, Juan Diego saw the young woman again (the second apparition), and she asked him to continue insisting.
The next day, Sunday, December 10, 1531, in the Julian calendar, Juan Diego spoke to the Archbishop a second time. The latter instructed him to return to Tepeyac and to ask the woman for a truly acceptable, miraculous sign to prove her identity. Later that day, the third apparition appeared when Juan Diego returned to Tepeyac; encountering the same woman, he reported to her the Archbishop's request for a sign, which she consented to provide on the next day (December 11).
On Monday, December 11, however, Juan Diego's uncle fell ill and he was obliged to attend to him. In the early hours of Tuesday, December 12, as Juan Bernardino's condition deteriorated, Juan Diego journeyed to Tlatelolco in search of a Catholic priest to hear Juan Bernardino's confession and help minister to him on his deathbed.
To avoid being delayed by the Virgin and ashamed at having failed to meet her on Monday as agreed, Juan Diego chose another route around Tepeyac Hill, yet the Virgin intercepted him and asked where he was going (fourth apparition); Juan Diego explained what had happened and the Virgin gently chided him for not having made recourse to her. In the words which have become the most famous phrase of the Guadalupe apparitions and are inscribed above the main entrance to the Basilica of Guadalupe, she asked "¿No estoy yo aquí que soy tu madre?" ("Am I not here, I who am your mother?"). She assured him that Juan Bernardino had now recovered and told him to gather flowers from the summit of Tepeyac Hill, which was normally barren, especially in the cold of December. Juan Diego obeyed her instruction and he found Castile roses, not native to Mexico, blooming there.
According to the story, the Virgin arranged the flowers in Juan Diego's tilmàtli or cloak, and when Juan Diego opened his cloak later that day before Archbishop Zumárraga, the flowers fell to the floor, revealing on the fabric the image of the Virgin.
The next day, December 13, Juan Diego found his uncle fully recovered as the Virgin had assured him, and Juan Bernardino recounted that he also had seen her after praying at his bedside (fifth apparition); that she had instructed him to inform the Archbishop of this apparition and of his miraculous cure; and that she had told him she desired to be known under the title of "Guadalupe".
The Archbishop kept Juan Diego's mantle, first in his private chapel and then in the church on public display, where it attracted great attention. On December 26, 1531, a procession formed to transfer the miraculous image back to Tepeyac Hill where it was installed in a small, hastily erected chapel. During this procession, the first miracle was allegedly performed when a native was mortally wounded in the neck by an arrow shot by accident during a stylized martial display performed in honor of the Virgin. In great distress, the natives carried him before the Virgin's image and pleaded for his life. Upon the arrow being withdrawn, the victim fully and immediately recovered.
The shrine to Our Lady of Guadalupe in Guadalupe, Cáceres, in Extremadura, Spain, was the most important of the shrines to the Virgin Mary in the medieval Kingdom of Castile. It is one of the many Black Madonnas in Spain and is revered in the Monastery of Santa María de Guadalupe, in the town of Guadalupe, from which numerous Spanish conquistadors stem.
The most popular etymology of the name "Guadalupe" is from the Arabic "Wadi" (river) and the Latin word "lupus" (wolf). Some find it unlikely that Arabic and Latin would be combined in this way, and suggest as an alternative the Arabic "Wadi-al-lub", signifying a river with black stones in its bed.
The shrine houses a statue reputed to have been carved by Luke the Evangelist and given to Archbishop Leander of Seville by Pope Gregory I. According to local legend, when Seville was taken by the Moors in 712, a group of priests fled northward and buried the statue in the hills near the Guadalupe River.
At the beginning of the 14th century, the Virgin appeared one day to a humble cowboy named Gil Cordero who was searching for a missing animal in the mountains. Cordero claimed that Mary had appeared to him and ordered him to ask priests to dig at the site of the apparition. Excavating priests rediscovered the hidden statue and built a small shrine around it which became the great Guadalupe monastery.
Following the Conquest in 1519–1521, the Marian cult was brought to the Americas and Franciscan friars often leveraged syncretism with existing religious beliefs as an instrument for evangelization. What is purported by some to be the earliest mention of the miraculous apparition of the Virgin is a page of parchment, the Codex Escalada from 1548, which was discovered in 1995 and, according to investigative analysis, dates from the sixteenth century. This document bears two pictorial representations of Juan Diego and the apparition, several inscriptions in Nahuatl referring to Juan Diego by his Aztec name, and the date of his death: 1548, as well as the year that the then named Virgin Mary appeared: 1531. It also contains the glyph of Antonio Valeriano; and finally, the signature of Fray Bernardino de Sahagun which was authenticated by experts from the Banco de Mexico and Charles E. Dibble. Historians Alberto Peralta and Stafford Poole questioned the authenticity of the document.