Celebrate Our Lady of Guadalupe

by Father David Cray, December 1, 2011.....In the calendar of the Roman Catholic Church, December 12 is the Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe—Nuestra Senora, or La Virgen, de Guadalupe. This year the feast will be marked in Charlotte with a special event, a Mass and social gathering with the Latino community of our area at Our Lady of Mount Carmel Church, 2940 Spear Street. The Mass will be celebrated by Father Gerard Leclerc, the priest especially assigned to do Hispanic ministry in the Diocese of Burlington. Members of Our Lady of Mount Carmel and of the Charlotte Congregational Church will participate and provide a buffet lunch.
Tradition says that on the morning of December 9, 1531, a 57-year-old Aztec widower originally named Cuauhtlatoatzin (“the eagle who speaks”) and baptized as Juan Diego had a vision of Mary, the mother of Jesus, on a hill called Tepeyac near Mexico City. Sending him to the Spanish colonial bishop of Mexico with instructions that a church should be built on the site where she appeared, Mary backed up his words with a sign of numerous roses that bloomed on the wintery hillside and that she arranged in his tilma or cloak. When he opened his cloak in the bishop’s presence, the roses fell to the floor and revealed the image of the Virgin miraculously imprinted on the fabric of the cloak. Devotion to Our Lady of Guadalupe sprang up and grew until Pope John Paul II named Mary under this title patroness of the Americas in 1999 and canonized Juan Diego as a saint of the Roman Catholic Church in 2002.
For the upcoming celebration, two features of the image are particularly interesting. First, Mary appears not as a Semitic or European woman, but as an Aztec princess with some traces of European features. Second, she is pregnant, as signified in Aztec culture by the black sash wrapped around her waist and tied in a bow at the front. The image points to a new people in the Americas, multiracial and multicultural, and brought forth by—in Christian theology—the mother of the Lord. We are indeed all sisters and brothers.
And so all sisters and brothers are invited to this ecumenical feast. This gathering follows a service and supper at the Charlotte Congregational Church on the Feast of the Epiphany (Dia De Los Reyes) in January. The new date and midday scheduling are in response to a survey of the Latino farmworkers who are invited.
This day is important to many around the world as a time to honor a saint revered as the comforter of migrants, the poor and the despairing. Mass will begin at 11:00 a.m. on Monday, December 12, followed by a lunch in the parish hall.