The new Basílica de Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe, built between 1974 and 1976, is one of the most-visited religious sites in the world.
My head was whirling with excitement at 7 AM last New Year's Day. I was
in a taxi going to the Guadalajara airport, ready to catch a flight to
Mexico City. Although I had lived in the Distrito Federal
(Mexico's capitol city) in the early 1980s, it had been too many years
since I'd been back. Now I was going to spend five days with my friends
Clara and Fabiola in their apartment in the southern section of the city.
We had drafted a long agenda of things we wanted to do and places we
wanted to visit together.
The old Basílica was finished in 1709. It's slowly sinking into the ground. You can easily see that it is not level.
First on our list, first on every list of everyone going to Mexico
City, is the Basílica of Our Lady of Guadalupe, the heart of the heart
of Mexico. When I chatted with my neighbors in Ajijic about my upcoming
trip, every single person's first question was, "Van a la Villa?" ("Are you going to the Basílica)"
To each inquirer I grinned and answered, "Of course! Vamos primero a echarle una visita a la virgencita." (The first thing we'll do is pay a visit to the little virgin!)
The interior of the new Basílica holds 50,000 people.
Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe is Mexico's patron saint, and her
image adorns churches and altars, house fronts and interiors, taxis and
buses, bull rings and gambling dens, restaurants and houses of ill
repute. The shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe, La Villa, is a
place of extraordinary vitality and celebration. On major festival days
such as the anniversary of the apparition on December 12th, the
atmosphere of devotion created by the hundreds of thousands of pilgrims
is truly electrifying.
Click here to see: List of Pilgrimages, December 2006. There are often 30 Masses offered during the course of a single day, each Mass for a different group of pilgrims as well as the general public.
The enormous Basílica of Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe in
Mexico City is the most visited pilgrimage site in the Western
Hemisphere. Its location, on the hill of Tepeyac, was a place of great
sanctity long before the arrival of Christianity in the New World. In
pre-Hispanic times, Tepeyac had been crowned with a temple dedicated to
an earth and fertility goddess called Tonantzin, the Mother of the
Gods. Tonantzin was a virgin goddess associated with the moon, like Our
Lady of Guadalupe who usurped her shrine.
The Tepeyac hill and shrine were important pilgrimage places
for the nearby Mexica (later Aztec) capital city of Tenochtitlán. Following the
conquest of Tenochtitlán by Hernan Cortez in 1521, the shrine was
demolished, and the native people were forbidden to continue their
pilgrimages to the sacred hill. The pagan practices had been considered
to be devil worship for more than a thousand years in Christian Europe.
Some of you may not know the story of Our Lady of Guadalupe. For all of us of whatever faith who love Mexico, it's
important to understand the origins of the one who is the Queen, the
Mother, the beloved guardian of the Republic and of all the Americas.
She is the key to understanding the character of Mexico. Without knowing her story, it's simply not possible to know Mexico. Indulge me
while I tell you.
On Saturday, December 9, 1531, a baptized Aztec Indian named
Juan Diego set out for church in a nearby town. Passing the pagan
sacred hill of Tepeyac, he heard a voice calling to him. Climbing the
hill, he saw on the summit a young woman who seemed to be no more than
fourteen years old, standing in a golden mist.
Revealing herself as the "ever-virgin Holy Mary, Mother of God" (so the
Christian telling of the story goes), she told Juan Diego not to be afraid. Her words? "Am I not here, who is your mother?" She instructed him to go to the
local bishop and tell him that she wished a church for her son to be built on the
hill. Juan did as he was instructed, but the bishop did not believe
him.
On his way home, Juan climbed the sacred hill and again saw the
apparition, who told him to return to the bishop the next day. This
time the bishop listened more attentively to Juan's message from Mary.
He was still skeptical, however, and so asked for a sign from Mary.
Two days later Juan went again to Tepeyac and, when he again
met Mary, she told him to climb the hill and pick the roses that were
growing there. Juan climbed the hill with misgivings. It was the dead
of winter, and flowers could not possibly be growing on the cold and
frosty mountain. At the summit, Juan found a profusion of roses, an
armful of which he gathered and wrapped in his tilma (a garment similar to a poncho). Arranging the roses, Mary instructed Juan to take the tilma-encased bundle to the bishop, for this would be her sign.
When the bishop unrolled the tilma, he was astounded by the presence of
the flowers. They were roses that grew only in Spain. But more truly miraculous was the image that had mysteriously
appeared on Juan Diego's tilma.
The image showed the young woman, her head lowered demurely. Wearing a
crown and flowing gown, she stood upon a half moon. The bishop was
convinced that Mary had indeed appeared to Juan Diego and soon
thereafter the bishop began construction of the original church devoted to her honor.
News of the miraculous apparition of the Virgin's image on a peasant's tilma spread
rapidly throughout Mexico. Indians by the thousands came from hundreds
of miles away to see the image, now hanging above the altar in the new
church. They learned that the mother of the Christian God had
appeared to one of their own kind and spoken to him in his native
language. The miraculous image was to have a powerful influence on the
advancement of the Church's mission in Mexico. In only seven years,
from 1532 to 1538, more than eight million Indians were converted to
Christianity.
The shrine, rebuilt several times over the centuries, is today a great Basílica with a capacity for 50,000 pilgrims.
Juan Diego's tilma is preserved behind bulletproof
glass and hangs twenty-five feet above the main altar in the basilica.
For more than 475 years the colors of the image have remained as bright
as if they were painted yesterday, despite being exposed for more than
100 years following the apparition to humidity, smoke from church
candles, and airborne salts.
The coarsely-woven cactus cloth of the tilma, a cloth considered to have a life expectancy of about 40 years, still
shows no evidence of decay. The 46 stars on her gown coincide with the
position of the constellations in the heavens at the time of the winter
solstice in 1531. Scientists have investigated the nature of the image
and have been left with nothing more than evidence of the mystery of a
miracle. The dyes forming her portrait have no base in the elements
known to science.
The origin of the name Guadalupe has always been a matter of
controversy. It is believed that the name came about because of the
translation from Nahuatl to Spanish of the words used by the Virgin
during the apparition. It is believed that she used the Nahuatl word coatlaxopeuh which is pronounced "koh-ah-tlah-SUH-peh" and sounds remarkably like the Spanish word Guadalupe.
'Coa' means serpent, 'tla' can be interpreted as "the", while 'xopeuh'
means to crush or stamp out. This version of the origin would indicate
that Mary must have called herself "she who crushes the serpent," a
Christian New Testament reference as well as a
a reference to the Aztec's mythical god, The Plumed Serpent.
Thien Gretchen photographed this wonderful group of statues in Seguin, Texas for the Seguin Daily Photo Blog . Similar statues are for sale at the Basílica.
Clara, Fabiola, and I took the Metro and a microbus to La Villa, a
journey of about an hour from their apartment in the south to the far northern part
of the city. We left the bus at the two-block-long bridge that leads to
the Basílica and decided to take a shopping tour before entering the
shrine. The street and the bridge are filled chock-a-block with booths
selling souvenirs of La Villa. Everything that you can think of (and
plenty you would never think of) is available: piles of t-shirts with
the image of the Virgin of Guadalupe and that of Juan Diego, CDs of
songs devoted to her, bandanna-like scarves with her portrait, eerie
green glow-in-the-dark figurines of her, key chains shaped like the
Basílica, statues of her in every size and quality, holy water
containers that look like her in pink, blue, silver, and pearly white
plastic, religious-theme jewelry and rosaries that smell of rose
petals, snow globes with tiny statues of La Guadalupana and the kneeling Juan Diego that are dusted with stars when the globes are shaken.
There are booths selling freshly arranged flowers for pilgrims to carry
to the shrine. There are booths selling soft drinks, tacos, and candy.
Ice cream vendors hawk paletas (popsicles). Hordes of children offer chicles (chewing gum) for sale. We were jostled and pushed as the crowd grew denser near the Basílica.
The virgin's image is everywhere.
Is it tacky? Yes, without a doubt. Is it wonderful? Yes, without a
doubt. It's the very juxtaposition of the tourist tchotchkes with the
sublime message of the heavens that explains so much about Mexico. I
wanted to buy several recuerdos
(mementos) for my neighbors in Ajijic and I was hard-pressed to decide
what to choose. Some pilgrims buy before going into the Basílica so
that their recuerdos can be blessed by a priest, but we decided to wait until after visiting the Virgin to do my shopping.
Pope John Paul II loved Mexico, loved Our Lady of Guadalupe, and visited the country five times during his tenure as pope. Here he celebrates Mass at the new Basílica.
The present church was constructed on the site of the 16th-century Old
Basílica, the one that was finished in 1709. When the Old Basílica
became dangerous due to the sinking of its foundations, a modern
structure called the new Basílica was built nearby. The original image
of the Virgin of Guadalupe is now housed above the altar in this new
Basílica.
Built between 1974 and 1976, the new Basílica was designed by
architect Pedro Ramírez Vásquez. Its seven front doors are an allusion
to the seven gates of Celestial Jerusalem referred to by Christ. It has
a circular floor plan so that the image of the Virgin can be seen from
any point within the building. An empty crucifix symbolizes Christ's
resurrection. The choir is located between the altar and the
churchgoers to indicate that it, too, is part of the group of the
faithful. To the sides are the chapels of the Santísimo Sacramento (the Blessed Sacrament) and of Saint Joseph.
One of the many processions that constantly arrive from cities and towns all over Mexico and the Americas.
We entered the tall iron gates to the Basílica atrium. It was still
early enough in the day that the crowds weren't crushing, although
people were streaming in. Clara turned to me, asking, "How do you feel,
now that you're back here?"
I thought about it for a moment, reflecting on what I was experiencing.
"The first time I came here, I didn't believe the story about the
Virgin's appearance to Juan Diego. I thought, 'Yeah, right'. But the minute I saw the tilma
that day, I knew—I mean I really knew—that it was all true, that she
really had come here and that really is her portrait." We were walking
closer and closer to the entrance we'd picked to go in and my heart was
beating faster. "I feel the same excitement coming here today that I
have felt every time since that first time I came, the same sense of
awe and wonder." Clara nodded and then lifted her head slightly to
indicate that I look at what she was seeing.
Faith
I watched briefly while a family moved painfully toward its goal. The father, on his knees and carrying the baby, was accompanied by his wife and young son, who walked next to him with his hand on his shoulder. Their older
son moved ahead of them on his knees toward an entrance of the
Basílica. Their faith was evident in their faces. The purpose of their
pilgrimage was not. Had the wife's pregnancy been difficult and was
their journey one of gratitude for a safe birth? Had the baby been born
ill? Was the father recently given a job to support the family, or did
he desperately need one? Whatever the reason for their pilgrimage, the
united family was going to see their Mother, either to ask for or to
give thanks for her help.
Clara, Fabiola, and I entered the Basílica as one Mass was
ending and another was beginning. Pilgrims were pouring in to place
baskets of flowers on the rail around the altar. The pews were filled
and people were standing 10-deep at the back of the church. There were
lines of people waiting to be heard in the many confessionals.
We stood for a bit and listened to what the priest was saying. "La
misa de once ya se terminó. Decidimos celebrar otra misa ahora a las
doce por tanta gente que ha llegado, por tanta fe que se demuestra"
("The Mass at eleven o'clock is over. We decided to celebrate another
Mass now at 12 o'clock because so many people have arrived, because of
so much faith being demonstrated.")
Indeed, this day was no special feast day on the Catholic calendar.
There was no celebration of a special saint's day. However, many people in
Mexico have time off from their work during the Christmas and New Year
holidays and make a pilgrimage to visit la Virgencita.
The framed tilma hangs above the main altar in the new Basílica. Photo courtesy of Hernán García Crespo.
Making our way through the crowd, we walked down a ramp into the area
below and behind the altar. Three moving sidewalks bore crowds of
pilgrims past the gold-framed tilma.
Tears flowed down the cheeks of some; others made the sign of the cross
as they passed, and one woman held her year-old baby up high toward the
Virgin. Most, including the three of us, moved from one of the moving
sidewalks to another in order to be able to have a longer visit with
the Mother of Mexico.
When I visited several years ago, there were only two moving
sidewalks. Behind them was space for the faithful to stand and reflect
or pray for a few minutes. Today's crush of visitors has required that
the space be devoted to movement rather than reflection and rest.
We walked to the back of the Basílica to look at a large bronze
crucifix exhibited in a glass case. The crucifix, approximately 3 feet
high, is bent backward in a deep arch and lies across a large cushion.
According to the placard and the photos from the era, in 1921 a bouquet
of flowers was placed directly on the altar of the Old Basílica beneath
the framed tilma.
It was later discovered that the floral arrangement was left at the
altar by an anarchist who had placed a powerful dynamite bomb among the
flowers. When the bomb detonated, the altar crucifix was bent nearly
double and large portions of the marble altar were destroyed.
Nevertheless, no harm came to the tilma and legend has it that the crucified Son protected his Mother.
After a while, we reluctantly left the Basílica. With a long backward glance at the tilma,
Clara, Fabiola, and I stepped out into the brilliantly sunny Mexico
City afternoon. The throngs in the Basílica atrium still pressed
forward to visit the shrine.
Jackson and Perkins created the Our Lady of Guadalupe hybrid floribunda rose.
We stopped in some of the enclosed shops at sidewalk level and then
continued over the bridge through the booths of mementos. After I
bought the gifts, we moved away to hail a taxi. My mind was still in
the Basílica, with our Mother.
On December 12 the tiny and gloriously beautiful Santuario de Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe in Morelia, Michoacán, will be in full fiesta.
Her feast day falls on December 12 each year. Think about her just for a moment as you go about your day. After all, she's the Queen of Mexico and the Empress of the Americas.
Glossary of loving terms for Our Lady of Guadalupe
How to get there once you're in Mexico City:
- From
the Centro Histórico (Historic Downtown) take Metro Line 3 at Hidalgo
and transfer to Line 6 at Deportivo 18 de Marzo. Go to the next
station, La Villa Basílica. Then walk north two busy blocks until
reaching the square.
- From the Hidalgo Metro station take a microbus to La Villa.
- From Zona Rosa take a pesero (microbus) along Reforma Avenue, north to the stop nearest the Basílica.
- Or take a taxi from your hotel, wherever it is in the city. Tell the driver, "A La Villa, por favor. Vamos a echarle una visita a la Virgencita." ("To the Basílica, please. We're going to make a visit to the little Virgin.")
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