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Saint Juan Diego
Painting of Juan Diego by Miguel Cabrera
Born	c. 1474, Tlayacac, Cuauhtitlan, Mexico
Died	May 30, 1548, Tenochtitlan, Mexico City, Mexico
Venerated in	Roman Catholicism
Beatified	April 9, 1990, Vatican, Rome by Pope John Paul II
Canonized	July 31, 2002, Basilica of Guadalupe, Mexico City, Mexico by Pope John Paul II
Major shrine	Basilica of Guadalupe, Mexico City, Mexico
Feast	December 9
Attributes	tilma
Saints Portal

Saint Juan Diego Cuauhtlatoatzin (1474 – May 30, 1548) was an indigenous Mexican who reported an apparition of the Virgin Mary as Our Lady of Guadalupe in 1531. He had a significant impact on the spread of the Catholic faith within Mexico. The Roman Catholic Church canonized him in 2002, as its first indigenous American saint.

Contents 1 Early life 2 Conversion to Christianity 3 The Apparition on Tepeyac Hill 3.1 The Encounter 3.2 Uniqueness and Similarity of the Apparition 4 Impact on Mexico and the Catholic Church 5 Investigations, canonization and symbolism 5.1 Veneration 5.2 Canonization 5.3 Symbolism 6 Depiction and image 7 See also 8 Notes 9 References 10 External links

Most of what is known about Juan Diego comes from a mid-17th century literary document called Huei tlamahuiçoltica (also called "Nican Mopohua") written in Classical Nahuatl by a Mexican priest and lawyer Luis Laso de la Vega.

According to this text, Juan Diego was born in 1474 in the calpulli of Tlayacac in Cuauhtitlán, a small Indian village some 20 km (12 mi) to the north of Tenochtitlan (Mexico City).

His original or birth name was Cuauhtlatoatzin^[1] (alternately rendered as Quauhtatoatzin, Guauhtlatoatzin, or Cuatliztactzin), which has been translated as "Talking Eagle" in the Nahuatl language.

Not much is known about Juan Diego’s family life; but he did not have any children with his wife.

A farmer, landowner and weaver of mats, he witnessed the Spanish conquest of Mexico by Hernán Cortés in 1521, when he was 47 years old. Following the invasion, in 1524, the first 12 Franciscan missionaries arrived in what is now Mexico City.

Cuauhtlatoatzin and his wife welcomed the Franciscans in 1524 or 1525 and were among the first to be baptized — he taking the Christian name of Juan Diego; she, Maria Lucia. Later, they moved to Tolpetlac to be closer to Tenochtitlan (Mexico City) and the Catholic mission that had been set up by the Franciscan friars.

According to his legend, after hearing a sermon on the virtue of chastity, they reportedly decided to live chaste lives. This decision was later cited as a possible reason for which the Virgin Mary chose to appear to Juan Diego. In 1529, a few years after her baptism, Maria Lucia became sick and died.

As a widower, Juan Diego was prone to long periods of silence. He walked every Saturday and Sunday to church, and on cold mornings, like other members of his Indian tribe, wore a woven cloth called a tilma, or ayate made with coarse fibers from the maguey cactus for cotton was only used by the upper class Aztec.

On Saturday morning, December 9, 1531, he reported the following: As he was walking to church, he heard the sound of birds singing on Tepeyac hill and someone calling his name. He ran up the hill, and saw a Lady, dressed like an Aztec princess. The Lady spoke to him in Nahuatl, his native tongue. She called him “Xocoyte,” her little son. He responded by calling her “Xocoyata,” his littlest daughter. The Lady asked Juan Diego to tell the bishop of Mexico, a Franciscan named Juan de Zumárraga, that she wanted a “teocalli,” a sacred little house, to be built on the spot where she stood.

Recognizing the Lady as the Virgin Mary, Juan Diego went to the bishop as instructed, but the Spanish bishop, Fray Juan de Zumárraga was doubtful and told Juan Diego he needed a sign. Juan Diego returned to Tepeyac hill and explained to the Lady that the bishop did not believe him. He implored the Lady to use another messenger, insisting he was not worthy. The Lady insisted he return to the bishop. On Sunday, Juan Diego did as the Lady directed, but again the bishop asked for a sign. Later that day, the Lady promised Juan Diego she would give him a sign the following day.

According to Juan Diego, he returned home that night to his uncle Juan Bernardino’s house, and discovered him seriously ill. The next morning December 12, Juan Diego decided not to meet with the Lady, but to find a priest who could administer the last rites to his dying uncle. When he tried to skirt around Tepeyac hill, the Lady stopped him, assured him his uncle would not die, and asked him to climb the hill and gather flowers. It was December, when normally nothing blooms in the cold. There he found roses from the region of Castille in Spain, former home of bishop Zumárraga. The Lady placed the roses carefully inside the folded tilma that Juan Diego wore and told him not to open it before anyone but the bishop. When Juan Diego unfolded his tilma before the Bishop roses cascaded from his tilma, and icon of Our Lady of Guadalupe was miraculously impressed on the cloth, bringing the bishop to his knees.

The bishop acknowledged the miracle and within two weeks, ordered a shrine to be built where the Virgin Mary had appeared. The bishop then entrusted the image to Juan Diego, who chose to live, until his death at age of 74 — on May 30, 1548 — in a small hermitage near the spot where the Virgin Mary had appeared. There he cared for the chapel and the first pilgrims who came to pray there, propagating the account of the apparitions in Mexico.

Among the various visions of Jesus and Mary Juan Diego's case is somewhat unique in that it produced a "physical artifact" that has survived for centuries. While other visionaries such as Maria Valtorta and Stefano Gobbi have produced large amounts of (at times dictation-like) text that they attribute to Jesus or the Virgin Mary, their visions or interior locutions have not been accompanied by a physical artifact. Juan Diego's tilma is thus unique in that it has survived and is venerated to this day.

And among the various visions of Jesus and Mary Juan Diego's case is somewhat similar to the case of Saint Bernadette Soubirous who in 1858 reported a vision of a miraculous Lady on a hill who asked Saint Bernadette to request that the local priests build a chapel at that site of her visions in Lourdes France. Like Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico, Our Lady of Lourdes is a major Catholic symbol in France.

News of the apparition on Tepayac Hill spread quickly through Mexico; and in the seven years that followed, 1532 through 1538, the Indian people accepted the Spaniards and 8 million people were converted to the Catholic faith. Thereafter, the Aztecs no longer practiced human sacrifice or native forms of worship.

According to Daniel Lynch, director of the Apostolate of the Missionary Image of Our Lady of Guadalupe, “An amazing thing happened. Indians became reconciled to Spaniards. And we had a new race of people. Mixed blood. We called them "Mestizos". Our Lady of Guadalupe had appeared as a Mestiza. They call her the dark virgin, the little brown one.”

Our Lady of Guadalupe, as the Virgin Mary came to be known in this context, still underpins the faith of many Catholics in Mexico and the rest of Latin America, and she is recognized as Patron saint of all the Americas.

Interestingly, the years 1532 to 1538 which saw a large number of people join the Catholic Church in Mexico based on Juan Diego's vision, were right in the midst of the period of Protestant Reformation of 1521 to 1579 in Europe. Hence as a large number of people left the Catholic Church in Europe, a large number of new Catholics appeared in Mexico, maintaining the overall strength of the Catholic Church. To this day, Latin America remains a major pillar of the Catholic Church.

Juan Diego was recognized by the Church soon after the apparition. He expressed a deep love for the Holy Eucharist, and by special permission of the Bishop he received Holy Communion three times a week, a highly unusual occurrence in those times.

In 1666, at a Church hearing called the Informaciones Guadalupana, Juan Diego was called a holy man, and in 1723 a formal investigation into this life was ordered by Archbishop Lanziego y Equilaz.

On Jan. 9, 1987, the Congregation for the Causes of Saints declared Juan Diego venerable. Pope John Paul II beatified him on May 6, 1990, during a Mass at the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico City, declaring Dec. 9 the feast of Juan Diego and invoking him as “protector and advocate of the indigenous peoples.”

Controversy over the historical authenticity of Juan Diego was stirred in 1996 by Father William Schulenburg, a longtime abbot of the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe, who called Juan Diego a mythical character.

The Vatican subsequently established a commission of 30 researchers from various countries to investigate the question. The commission's view was that Juan Diego had indeed existed, and the results of their research were presented to the Vatican Congregation for the Causes of Saints on Oct. 28, 1998. Among research documents submitted at that time were 27 Guadalupe Indian documents. One, called the “Escalada,” co-authored by Valeriano and Franciscan Friar Bernardino de Sahagun, contained a death certificate of Juan Diego.

Juan Diego became a canonized saint in the Roman Catholic Church on July 31, 2002^[2]. Pope John Paul II praised Juan Diego for his simple faith nourished by catechesis and pictured him (who said to the Blessed Virgin Mary: "I am a nobody, I am a small rope, a tiny ladder, the tail end, a leaf") as a model of humility.

By 1820, when the Mexican War of Independence from Spanish colonial rule ended, Our Lady of Guadalupe had come to symbolize the Mexican nation. The armies of both Miguel Hidalgo in 1810 and Emiliano Zapata in 1914 flew Guadalupan flags. Today it remains a strong national and religious symbol in Mexico.

Many Mexicans also see the canonization of Juan Diego as a symbolic victory in the movement for greater recognition of their heritage reflected in the Catholic religion; Pope John Paul II held a Mass in Mexico that borrowed from Aztec traditions, including a reading from the Bible in Nahuatl. The Pope urged the Catholic Church in Mexico to be respectful of indigenous traditions and to incorporate them into religious ceremonies when appropriate.

There was controversy over the official image of Juan Diego selected by the Archdiocese of Mexico City in 2002. Critics feel that it depicts Juan Diego as having European features rather than the features of a Mexican Indian.[1]

Some faithful Catholics believe they can see a reflected image of Juan Diego in the eyes of Our Lady of Guadalupe. The first reported case was in 1929, when Alfonso Marcue, the official photographer of the old Basilica of Guadalupe in Mexico City stated that he had noticed a reflected image of a bearded man in the right eye of the Virgin. Church authorities in Mexico instructed him to remain silent about it at the time. In 1951, Jose Carlos Salinas Chavez, publicly reported discovering the image and also a reflection in the left eye. Since then fascination with the reflection has continued.

In 1979 Jose Aste Tonsmann, PhD used high quality scanners at IBM corporation and applied filterng techniques to enhance a digitized images of the eyes of Our Lady of Guadalupe to eliminate noise. He published his studies on the eyes on the tilma in the book "El Secreto de sus Ojos", along with several photographs. He reported that in one of the photographs bishop Zumárraga and a “translator" can be seen next to Juan Diego [2].

• Our Lady of Guadalupe
• Movement of Love Saint Juan Diego

• Saint Juan Diego official site
• Biography from a Catholic site dedicated to Our Lady of Guadalupe
• Biography from the Holy See for Juan Diegos Canonization
• Juan Diego at the Rosary Workshop
• Digitally Eenhanced images of the eyes of the Virgin of Guadalupe