I got to daily Mass today only to realize that it was a Marian feast day! Hooray....I love Marian feast days...especially when I get on Facebook and realize that many of my friends are as excited as I am...
Not many people know this, but Our Lady of Guadalupe is one of my favorite apparitions for so many reasons:
1) The way cool story of Juan Diego, and Mary's direct intervention on the part of the Mexican people, barely ten years after the Aztec empire had been conquered, and the Spanish were trying to enforce Catholicism on them. Because of her appearance to poor Juan Diego (who was probably terrified at the prospect of appealing to the Bishop at Her request!), Mexico's people were no longer so disenchanted; they established an identity separate from the Spanish, and benefitted from the justice Mary sought for them.
2) When Mary appeared to Juan Diego, she had dark skin and dark eyes, was dressed in a common Aztec garment, and spoke in their native tongue. She claims all people as Her children!
3) Because of this, there is a cultural devotion to Our Lady that goes beyond religious affiliation. Even those of Hispanic ethnicity who may not be Catholic commonly show devotion to Our Lady of Guadalupe.
4) The miraculous scientific findings about Juan Diego's tilma with the image. They are SOOO COOL. I only can explicitly, accurately remember two...but there are so many more. For example, the "paint" used in the depiction of the image is unlike any man-made paint that exists. And my favorite: Human eyes are unique from other animals' in that the pupil reflects what the eye is looking at. When the pupils of the image on the tilma were magnified, the shadowy figures in them exactly mirrored the positions of the people in the room where Juan Diego first revealed his cloak of roses (which do not normally grow in December!). CRAZY COOL!
5) Our Lady of Guadalupe is patronness of the Americas, which is appropriate as Father Curran pointed out today, because we are nations that have both extreme wealth and extreme poverty, and Our Lady stands as a proponent of justice for the poor.
6) And finally, I'm a big fan of Our Lady of Guadalupe because She is also patronness of the unborn, and a huge intercessor for the pro-life cause. Naturally, my passion in being pro-life has drawn me to this specific apparition of Her.
Pro-life patronage segues into the main point of my post....Mass. Today, the first reading was from the book of Revelation. I am very familiar with the passage about the Woman who covers the sun with twelve stars above Her head. She's pregnant and laboring to give birth right? So awesome, because that is what Mary's important for...giving the world it's Savior...yada yada yada...
But one little detail I've never had memorized was the description of the dragon.
"...it was a huge red dragon, with seven heads and ten horns, and on its heads were seven diadems. It's tail swept away a third of the stars in the sky and hurled them down to the earth. Then the dragon stood before the woman about to give birth, to devour her child when she gave birth." ~Revelation 12:3-4
I don't know how many people know this, but the general statistic is that 1 out of every 3 pregnancies in America is terminated by abortion. Think about it. 1/3 of the generation conceived since Roe vs. Wade was legalized in 1973 was never born. A third of the stars in Mary's sky, a third of Her children, are silenced by the red dragon of abortion. Evil waits to attack those who are most innocent, most defenseless in our society. And the book of Revelation says it all. God knows. So does Mary.
I know that if you skip to the end of the good Book, you find out that Good wins, right? But what can we do in the meantime, to fight for those precious stars, those precious children of Mary?
Grace to you, and peace.
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