Human Flower Project

Tuesday, December 12, 2006

Nuestra Señora

By the end of the day, December 12, 2006

Our Lady of Guadalupe Church, Austin, TX

Photo: Bill Bishop

In Mexico City, more than 5 million pilgrims came to her Basilica. Thousands danced to honor her in the streets of Los Angeles. Her image was dedicated for the first time inside a Virginia church.

Here in Austin, Texas, Our Lady of Guadalupe was filled with holy celebration from sunup until long after dark on this, her feast day. By 9 pm, the church and a grotto outside both overflowed with roses.

“In 1531, during the conquest of Mexico by Spain, an apparition appeared to Juan Diego, a lowly Indian walking to Mass near Mexico City. The apparition requested him to deliver to the bishop a request to build a church at that spot in her honor. After rebuffing Juan Diego several times, the bishop asked for a sign.

The main altar Our Lady of Guadalupe Catholic Church

December 12, 2006

Photo: Bill Bishop

“When the apparition appeared to Juan Diego again, he told her of the bishop’s request. The Virgin instructed Juan Diego to gather roses that were growing nearby, unusual for that time of year, as the sign of her existence. When Juan Diego went to the bishop, he opened his tilma to show him the roses, revealing instead an image imprinted on the cloak of a cinnamon-skinned virgin who came to be known as Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe.

“A few years later, the first church was built on that spot in Tepeyac, a few miles north of Mexico City.”

The oldest sources we could find for this story don’t specify the flowers were roses, but over time they have come to be the flowers most associated with “The Mother of the Americas.”

David Sedeño wrote a fine article for the Ft. Worth newspaper about current controversies surrounding the Virgin of Guadalupe. Her presence, powerful and growing, disquiets some non-Hispanic Catholics. Others complain that Protestant denominations have adopted the Mexican Mary to recruit new members.

“She is an image of a mestiza which gives us a kind of picture of what the future of the Church, with a capital C, is going to look like,”  Maxwell Johnson, a Lutheran and a theology professor at Notre Dame University, told Sedeño.  “Ultimately, in the future, we all are going to resemble her.”

Rev. Virgilio Elizondo of San Antonio isn’t worried that Protestants have been drawn to Our Lady of Guadalupe: “It’s expanding something that is very true and very beautiful.”