Our Lady of Guadalupe

Homily for the Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe

Both the Second Vatican Council and Pope Francis tell us that the proclamation of our faith has to be inculturated - that our faith has to be transmitted in a form that resonates with the local culture. We are spontaneously in resonance with our own culture, but being in resonance with a different culture is not necessarily spontaneous. In-culturation requires on our side some degree of ex-culturation, a distancing of ourselves from the culture with which we are already familiar. Lack of ex-culturation leads to lack of in-culturation.

The image of Our Lady of Guadalupe is clearly an inculturated image depicting an Aztec woman, not a Spanish or European woman. But the name Guadalupe is itself a glaring example of the lack of inculturation on the side of the hierarchy in those colonial years. There exists in Midwest Spain a centuries old shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe and that was all that Juan de Zumárraga, bishop of Mexico, knew. So, when he asked Juan Diego for the name of the Lady that had appeared to him and he heard in the Nauatl language the name Coatlaxopeuh (translated crushes the serpent and pronounced Quatlasupe), the non-exculturated bishop, who knew only of Spain’s Guadalupe, felt a need to “correct” Juan Diego: “you mean Guadalupe”. And the non-inculturated name sank roots locally and beyond.

God writes straight with lines that to us may look crooked and, when today people hear the name Guadalupe, they think of that Aztec-looking Mary, not of the other less known shrine in the Extremadura region of Spain. This is the inculturated Guadalupe of Mexico and of the Tepeyac hill that we celebrate today as patroness not only of Mexico and Latin America, but in fact as patroness of the entire Americas, of the entire continent.

Fr. Lawrence Jagdfeld, O.F.M., Administrator