St. Juan Diego

The Eagle Who Speaks

Juan Diego was a Nahua man of the Chichimeca people, born about 1474 at Cuauhtitlán, north of what is now Mexico City, and so a grown man of nearly fifty when the Spanish conquest overturned his world. His Nahuatl name, Cuauhtlatoatzin, is usually translated "the eagle who speaks" or "one who speaks like an eagle."

He was baptised in the mid-1520s by the Franciscan missionaries who arrived after the conquest, taking the name Juan Diego, and his wife was baptised as María Lucía. She died in 1529. He was a widower living at Tolpetlac, walking regularly to Tlatelolco for instruction and for Mass, when the events at Tepeyac took place. He was not a noble, a warrior or a scholar. The accounts describe a man of ordinary standing who considered himself of no importance.

In December 1531, on his way to Mass, he encountered a young woman on Tepeyac hill. She spoke to him in Nahuatl, his own language, and addressed him with the tender diminutives of that language, calling him her dearest son.

The Messenger of Guadalupe

The lady told Juan Diego that she was the ever-virgin Mary, mother of the true God, and asked that a church be built on that spot so that she could show and give her love, compassion, help and defence to all the people of that land. She sent him to the bishop with the request.

The bishop was Juan de Zumárraga, a Franciscan and the first bishop of Mexico. Juan Diego went, waited, was heard politely and was not believed. He came back to the hill and asked the lady to send somebody important instead, someone the bishop would take seriously, since he was a small man, a nobody, a length of rope, a ladder's bottom rung. She refused. She told him that she had many servants she could send and that she wanted him.

That exchange is the reason the Church honours Juan Diego rather than treating him as a supporting character. He argued that he was the wrong man, and the answer was that he was precisely the man wanted. Our page on Our Lady of Guadalupe covers the apparition itself and the image in detail.

The Four Apparitions, in Order

The traditional account gives four appearances to Juan Diego over four days, and a fifth to his uncle.

• Saturday. On his way to Mass, Juan Diego hears birdsong on Tepeyac and is called by name. The lady identifies herself and sends him to the bishop.
• Saturday evening. He returns having been received without belief, asks her to send someone of higher standing, and is told to go again.
• Sunday. The bishop asks for a sign. Juan Diego reports this back and is told to return the next day for it.
• Monday. His uncle Juan Bernardino falls gravely ill, and Juan Diego stays with him instead. On Tuesday he sets out for a priest, taking a route around the hill to avoid the lady, out of embarrassment. She comes to meet him anyway and says the words that are quoted most often from the whole account: let nothing trouble him, is she not there, who is his mother. She tells him his uncle is already well.
• Tuesday. She sends him to the top of the hill to gather flowers. He finds Castilian roses blooming out of season on frozen ground, she arranges them in his cloak with her own hands, and he carries them to the bishop.

Meanwhile, according to the account, the lady appeared to Juan Bernardino, healed him, and told him the name by which she wished to be known, which reached Spanish ears as Santa María de Guadalupe.

The Miracle of the Tilma

Juan Diego opened his tilma, a cloak of coarse fibre, in front of the bishop, and the roses fell out. On the cloth was the image of the woman he had been describing. The bishop and his household went to their knees.

The tilma hangs today above the altar of the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico City, and the image on it is the most reproduced religious image in the Spanish-speaking world. Its details are read as a message in the visual language of the Nahua: the woman stands in front of the sun rather than being consumed by it, the moon is beneath her feet, she is clearly pregnant by the position of the sash, and her downcast eyes and joined hands show her as one who prays rather than one who is prayed to.

What is claimed, and what the Church has defined

Various studies of the image have been carried out over the centuries, and they have reached different conclusions. Some researchers have reported features they consider unexplained, including the state of preservation of the fabric and details in the eyes. Other analysts, including restorers who examined it closely, have concluded that parts of the image, such as some of the gold work and the surrounding rays, were added after 1531.

The Church has never defined any scientific claim about the tilma, and no Catholic is required to hold one. What the Church has approved is the apparition itself, as a private revelation, and it has canonised the man who carried the message. Guadalupe is not a doctrine and it is not a proof. It is a devotion the Church has judged worthy of belief, and belief in it is offered rather than imposed.

The Sources: Where the Account Comes From

The narrative above comes almost entirely from one text, the Nican Mopohua, a Nahuatl account whose title is taken from its opening words, "here it is recounted." It is a work of considerable literary quality in classical Nahuatl, and it is traditionally attributed to Antonio Valeriano, a Nahua scholar educated at the college of Santa Cruz de Tlatelolco, who is thought to have written it in the middle of the sixteenth century.

The Nican Mopohua was published in 1649 by Luis Laso de la Vega, within a larger Nahuatl work. A Spanish account by the priest Miguel Sánchez had appeared the year before, in 1648. Both are more than a century after the events.

Other documentation exists and each piece is contested. The Informaciones Jurídicas of 1666 collected sworn testimony from elderly indigenous witnesses at Cuauhtitlán about what their families remembered of Juan Diego. A small document known as the Codex Escalada, bearing a date of 1548 and Valeriano's name, came to light in 1995, and specialists disagree about its authenticity.

The Historical Debate About Juan Diego

This section exists because the question is asked constantly and is usually answered by pretending it was never raised.

The objections

• No document from 1531 records the apparitions. Bishop Zumárraga's surviving writings do not mention them, although he wrote a good deal.
• Sixteenth-century Franciscan missionaries in Mexico, including the great ethnographer Bernardino de Sahagún, were uneasy about the growing devotion at Tepeyac and warned that it might be a cover for the veneration of an older goddess honoured at that same hill.
• In 1556 a Franciscan provincial preached publicly against the cult and said the image had been painted by an indigenous artist, which set off a formal inquiry by the archbishop. That dispute is documented and shows there was already argument about the shrine within a generation.
• In the 1990s Guillermo Schulenburg, then abbot of the basilica itself, said publicly that he regarded Juan Diego as a symbolic figure rather than a historical person. He resigned in 1996, and the controversy was widely reported before the canonisation.

What the Church did with them

The Congregation for the Causes of Saints did not ignore the objections. An additional historical examination was carried out before the canonisation went ahead, drawing on the Nahuatl sources, the 1666 testimony and the studies of specialists, and the conclusion reached was that the historical existence of Juan Diego was sufficiently established. John Paul II canonised him in 2002 in the basilica at Tepeyac.

Two things follow, and both are worth holding. A canonisation is a judgment about a person's holiness and it presupposes that the person existed, so the Church has committed itself on that point. And the documentary record is genuinely thin by the standards historians would prefer, which is why the argument continues among scholars and why a Catholic can say so without embarrassment.

A Life of Service

After the chapel was built, Juan Diego left his home and his land and moved into a small dwelling beside it, where he lived for the remaining seventeen years of his life. He kept the chapel, received the pilgrims who began arriving almost at once, and told them what had happened. He is described as spending long hours in prayer and as approaching the sacraments frequently, which for an indigenous layman in that period was unusual enough to be noted.

He treated the image with reverence and directed everyone's attention past it, to the mother of God and to her Son. He died in 1548, in his mid seventies, in the same place.

The decades that followed saw enormous numbers of indigenous people in Mexico baptised, and the shrine at Tepeyac became the centre of Mexican Catholic life, which it has remained. The account of a European mother appearing to a conquered people in their own language, wearing their own symbols, and asking for a church to be built for them, did work that no amount of preaching in Spanish had done.

Canonisation, Feast Day and Devotion

His feast on 9 December marks the first apparition, three days before the feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe. In Mexico the two run together into one of the largest religious observances anywhere, with millions of pilgrims converging on the basilica in the days around 12 December, many walking the final stretch. Our guide to visiting the Basilica of Guadalupe covers the practicalities.

Juan Diego is honoured particularly by indigenous Catholics across the Americas and by anyone who has been told they are too unimportant to be asked. John Paul II presented him at the canonisation as the model of an indigenous Christian and of a layman who did what he was asked.

Quotable Wisdom

"Do not let your heart be disturbed... Am I not here, who am your Mother?"

These are the words the account gives to Our Lady when Juan Diego, whose uncle was dying, tried to avoid her by taking the far side of the hill. She met him on the route he had chosen to escape her, and asked him what was troubling him before saying this. The full passage goes on to ask whether he is not in her shadow and under her protection, and whether he needs anything more.

They are quoted throughout Latin America and are carved into the basilica. Our page on Mary, the Mother of God sets out what Catholics believe about her intercession and why words like these are not addressed to a substitute for Christ.

What a Reader Can Take From Juan Diego

Being unqualified is not a reason to be excused

He offered the bishop's disbelief, his own low standing and a dying uncle as reasons to send someone else. All three were true, and none of them was accepted. The task in front of you is unlikely to come with better credentials than his.

God speaks in the language people actually have

The whole force of the Guadalupe account is that the message came in Nahuatl, with Nahua symbols, to a Nahua man. Anyone trying to hand on the faith should notice the method and copy it.

Go the second time

Juan Diego went back to the bishop after being dismissed. Most of what gets done in a Christian life is done on the second attempt, and no one knows the day or the hour (Mark 13:32), so the second attempt should be soon.

Frequently Asked Questions

When is the feast day of St. Juan Diego?

9 December, the day of the first apparition in 1531. The feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe follows on 12 December, and the two are celebrated together across Mexico and much of the Americas.

Was Juan Diego a real person?

The Church holds that he was, and canonised him in 2002 after an additional historical examination prompted by public objections, including those of a former abbot of the basilica. The evidence rests chiefly on the Nahuatl Nican Mopohua, on sworn indigenous testimony collected in 1666, and on other contested documents. No record from 1531 itself survives, which is why some historians remain unconvinced. This page reports both.

What is the tilma?

A tilma is a cloak of coarse fibre worn by indigenous men in sixteenth-century Mexico. Juan Diego's tilma, on which the image of Our Lady of Guadalupe appeared according to the account, hangs above the altar in the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico City.

What did Our Lady of Guadalupe ask Juan Diego to do?

To go to the bishop of Mexico and ask that a church be built on Tepeyac hill, so that she could show her love and compassion to the people of that land and hear their sorrows there. When the bishop asked for a sign, she gave Castilian roses blooming out of season, and the image on the cloak that carried them.

Is Juan Diego the first indigenous saint of the Americas?

Yes. He was canonised on 31 July 2002 as the first indigenous saint of the Americas. St. Kateri Tekakwitha, a Mohawk woman canonised in 2012, was the first Native American saint of the United States and Canada.

Do Catholics have to believe in the apparition at Guadalupe?

No. Guadalupe is a private revelation approved by the Church, which means it has been judged worthy of belief and is not part of the deposit of faith that every Catholic must hold. The canonisation of Juan Diego is a judgment about a person's holiness. Devotion to Our Lady of Guadalupe is offered to Catholics rather than required of them.