Homily for the Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe

Our Gospel today picks up precisely where the Gospel from our other great Advent celebration of Mary left off … Last Wednesday, on the Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception we heard St. Luke’s account of Gabriel’s visit to Mary, announcing that she would be the Mother of God.

Now, in today’s Gospel, St. Luke tells us that Mary “set out in haste traveling to the hill country” to the house of Zechariah, to visit her cousin Elizabeth, whom Gabriel has said is also pregnant, even in her old age.

And when Mary reaches Elizabeth, the infant John the Baptist leaps for joy in her womb, recognizing that the Savior and Messiah, the fulfillment of God’s promise, has been carried to him by His mother, Mary.

Today we celebrate the Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe: the commemoration of our Blessed Mother’s appearance, in 1531, to St. Juan Diego on the hill at Tepeyac, outside Mexico City. 

In the middle of December, to prove that she was who she said she was, Mary made Castilian roses bloom on that hill.  And when Juan Diego collected those roses in his cloak, and then dropped them at the feet of the bishop, the image of Mary was there, on his cloak, where the roses once had been.

Juan Diego’s tilma, which still hangs in the Basilica of Guadalupe, shows Mary with a mestizo face, mixing both the Spanish and the Mexican in her likeness, and making her, in Blessed John Paul II’s words, Mother of the Americas: these two continents of a mixed cultures.  She also wears a robe covered in stars, the sun shines from behind her, and she stands upon the crescent moon, just as we hear St. John describe his vision in our first reading from the Book of Revelation.

But perhaps most interestingly, Mary’s image on the tilma shows her wearing a black cloth band tied around her waist – the sign in Aztec culture that the young woman is pregnant. 

Our Gospel text is therefore the perfect reading for this feast, because at Guadalupe the pregnant Mary brings the Christ-Child in her womb to Juan Diego, and to the peoples of the New World, just as surely as she brought Jesus to Elizabeth and to John at Her Visitation.

With the Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception, today’s Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe is also, therefore, the perfect Advent celebration.  Mary shows us precisely what it means to wait in faithful expectation for the fulfillment of God’s promise – she assures us of the hope that her Divine Son offers the world – and she encourages us to follow her example in carrying Christ’s life to our brothers and sisters.

More than anything else, these are the central messages of Advent, and the central messages of this Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe: Christ is the hoped-for Messiah, whose coming answers our every longing and desire, and we too can carry Christ to the world as we await His Second Coming.

Now amidst all of our fretting about getting ready for Christmas – and especially in the midst of all of our anxiety over exams and papers, it’s easy to lose sight of the hope that Advent brings.  We’re so stressed and haggard at this time of year. 

And that’s precisely why we need this season so much, and that’s why we all need this Feast of Our Lady of Gudalupe as well.  Listen to the words that Mary used to comfort Juan Diego that day, speaking in his native tongue: 

“Listen – Put it in your heart, my youngest and dearest son, that the thing that frightened you, the thing that afflicted you is nothing.  Do not let it disturb you.  Do not fear … any sharp or hurtful thing.  Am I not here, I who am your mother?  Are you not under the shadow of my protection?  Am I not the source of your joy?  Are you not in the fold of my mantle, in the crossing of my arms?  Do you need something more?  Let nothing else worry you or disturb you.”

Since that day on Tepeyac, Christero rebels defending the rights of the Church in Mexico, migrant farm workers demanding just wages and safe working conditions in California, and volunteers defending the lives of the unborn and serving unwed mothers throughout America, have all marched under the banner of Our Lady of Guadalupe. 

That’s because as her words to Juan Diego make clear, and as this Advent season celebrates, there is no struggle, no situation, no sin that we might find ourselves in that is beyond the hope that Mary bears to the world in Her Son. 

So today, in the midst of Advent, in the midst of whatever worry, doubt, or sin we might find ourselves, we commend ourselves once more to the care of our Blessed Mother, the Virgin of Guadalupe.  And we ask her to intercede for us, that we might have an increase in the hope her Son brings – and we ask her to speak once more to our hearts, the way she spoke to Juan Diego: “Listen – Put it in your heart, the thing that afflicted you is nothing … let nothing else worry you or disturb you.”


 (Homily for the Knights of Columbus student Mass at The Catholic University of America, December 12, 2011)