Our Lady of Guadalupe

Our Lady of Guadalupe (Spanish: Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe), also known as the Virgin of Guadalupe (Spanish: Virgen de Guadalupe), is a Roman Catholic title of the Blessed Virgin Mary associated with a venerated image enshrined within the Minor Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe in México City. The basilica is the most visited Catholic pilgrimage site in the world, and the world's third most-visited sacred site.

Marian apparitions

Official Catholic accounts state that the Virgin Mary appeared four times before Juan Diego and one more before Juan Diego's uncle. According to these accounts the first apparition occurred on the morning of December 9, 1531, when a native Mexican peasant named Juan Diego saw a vision of a maiden at a place called the Hill of Tepeyac, which would become part of Villa de Guadalupe, a suburb of Mexico City. Speaking to Juan Diego in his native Nahuatl language (the language of the Aztec empire), the maiden identified herself as the Virgin Mary, "mother of the very true deity" and asked for a church to be built at that site in her honor.

Our Lady of Guadalupe Parish (Taos, New Mexico)

Our Lady of Guadalupe Parish or Nuestra Senora de Guadalupe is located just west of the Taos Plaza at 205 Don Fernando Street in downtown Taos, New Mexico.

History

Having received permission from Durango, Mexico's Bishop Olivares built the Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe church in Taos as a Franciscan mission of San Geronimo Parish at the Taos Pueblo beginning on November 18, 1801. It was completed in 1802 and had adobe walls 3 to 4 feet thick and a flat roof. Fray José Benito Pereyro, OFM, served the church.

Padre Antonio José Martínez served the parish church beginning in August 1826. He was the first non-Franciscan priest. In 1833 it was commonly known as the "Padre Martinez church" and became a parish church under the patronage of Our Lady of Guadalupe by Bishop Zubiria of Durango. It was the first Our Lady of Guadalupe churches in what is now the United States.San Francisco de Asis Mission Church in Ranchos de Taos and San Geronimo Church at Taos Pueblo then became mission churches of the parish.

Our Lady of Guadalupe, Extremadura

The shrine to Our Lady of Guadalupe was the most important Marian shrine in the medieval kingdom of Castile. It is revered in the monastery of Santa María de Guadalupe, in today's Cáceres province of the Extremadura autonomous community of Spain.

Our Lady of Guadalupe is one of three Black Madonnas in Spain. The statue was canonically crowned on 12 October 1928 with a crown designed and crafted by Father Felix Granda.

Shrine

The shrine houses a statue reputed to have been carved by Luke the Evangelist and given to Saint Leander, archbishop 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 in Extremadura. 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 the Virgin 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 evolved into the great Guadalupe monastery.

Shrines to the Virgin Mary

In the culture and practice of some Christian churches — mainly, but not solely, the Roman Catholic Church — a shrine to the Virgin Mary (or Marian shrine) is a shrine marking an apparition or other miracle ascribed to the Blessed Virgin Mary, or a site on which is centered a historically strong Marian devotion. Such locales are often the destination of pilgrimages.

Some of the largest shrines arose from reported Marian apparitions to young and simple people on remote hilltops that had hardly been heard of prior to the reported apparition. The story of Saint Juan Diego's reported vision of Our Lady of Guadalupe in 1531 is similar to that of Saint Bernadette Soubirous' vision in 1858 of Our Lady of Lourdes. Both saints reported a miraculous woman on a hilltop who asked them to request that the local priests build a chapel at the site of the vision. Both visions included a reference to roses and led to large churches being built at the sites. Like Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico, Our Lady of Lourdes is a major Catholic symbol in France. Both visionaries were eventually declared saints.