St. Juan Diego

Who they were

Juan Diego Cuauhtlatoatzin, the talking eagle, was an indigenous man of the Valley of Mexico, a widower in his fifties, walking to Mass in December 1531, a decade after the conquest had shattered his world. At the hill of Tepeyac, by the account written in Nahuatl within living memory, the Nican Mopohua, a lady met him speaking his own language, called him by the affectionate diminutive Juanito, and sent him, a man the colonial order counted as nobody, to the bishop with a request for a church.

Twice dismissed, he asked the lady to send someone more important. Her answer is the heart of the devotion: am I not here, I who am your mother? The sign that ended the argument was Castilian roses in December, gathered in his tilma, and when he opened the cloak before the bishop the roses fell and the image was there. The tilma, agave fibre with an expected lifespan of decades, hangs in the Basilica of Guadalupe today, nearly five centuries later, before the largest pilgrimage crowds of any Marian shrine on earth. He was canonized in 2002, the first indigenous saint of the Americas.

Why people turn to St. Juan Diego

Indigenous and mestizo faithful first, since the Guadalupe event is the founding moment of American Christianity as a native inheritance rather than an import. And everyone ever sent with a message while feeling like the wrong messenger.

How to ask their intercession

His feast opens Guadalupe week, with Our Lady's on the twelfth. Am I not here, I who am your mother, is the line to pray with.