Originally published on December 12, 2014.
(Dec. 12th was) the feast day of our Lady of Guadalupe, Patroness of the Americas. She holds particular significance to the Catholic Church in America, as her appearance to St. Juan Diego on Tepeyac hill in Mexico was the first Marian apparition in the New World. She is dearly beloved by Mexican Catholics, and wherever there is a Mexican community, a statue or picture of her will be found. Another less well-known fact about Our Lady of Guadalupe is that she is connected to the Spanish Reconquista and their ultimate defeat of the centuries-long Islamic invasion of their homeland.
The story begins shortly after Jesus’ death with St. Luke. He was not only a gospel writer, but an artist and craftsman. He painted the first icons, and created the first statues of Jesus and Mary. One of these statues of the Blessed Virgin was eventually brought to Spain three centuries later by St. Leander and enshrined in a church in Spain’s Extremadura province, where it stayed for several additional centuries. …