Ten Amazing Facts about the Miraculous Image of Our Lady of Guadalupe
Big Catholics
Posted 12-12-2016
http://www.bigccatholics.com/2016/12/ten-amazing-facts-about-miraculous.html
Nice share, very beautiful.
The linked page has some wonderful observations and descriptions.
Here is a copy of amazing fact number 9:
9. Our Lady of Guadalupe and the miraculous roses.
The Spanish rulers of the native population were brutal, and war between them seemed inevitable. In 1531, the archbishop of Mexico City, Juan de Zumárraga prayed to Our Lady for peace. As a sign that his petition would be granted, he asked to receive roses native to his home region of Castile, Spain.
Our Lady told Juan Diego to present Bishop Zumárraga her request that a church be built for her on the hill of Tepeyac (now part of Mexico City) where people could receive God's grace. Bishop Zumárraga was skeptical of Diego's account and asked that Our Lady produce a sign verifying her identity.
That afternoon, Mary instructed Juan Diego to return the next day (December 11th) and she would provide proof. That night, however, Diego's uncle became deathly ill, and Diego never returned. Early the morning of December 12th, Diego journeyed to Tlatleloco to find a priest so his uncle could confess his sins before dying. In doing so, he passed Tepeyac Hill. Afraid Mary would interrupt his errand, he went to the other side of the hill, but Our Lady came to meet him.
Mary assured Diego his uncle would recover. She told him to go to the top of the hill and gather the flowers there. Diego discovered, growing in the frozen earth, a miraculous garden of castilian roses not native to Mexico. Diego brought them to Mary, who arranged them in his tilma, with instructions that he take them to the bishop. Before Bishop Zumárraga, Juan Diego opened his cloak. The roses fell to the floor revealing the image of Mary. The Bishop's prayers had been answered.
There is what seems to me a gap in the story, at the moment when the roses fell to the floor. It seems to me that Blessed Juan Diego would never have allowed the roses to fall down, especially if Our Lady had arranged them in his tilma. He was bringing to the bishop an answer to his request for "a sign" and Diego had no foreknowledge of the bishop's prayer to the Blessed Virgin for specifically Castillian roses, nor would Diego have known anything about such roses that were not found in Mexico at the time. He most likely had never seen a Castilian rose. One version of this story says that the bishop had been very fond of this type of rose, native to his homeland across the Atlantic Ocean and he had been longing to see such roses for many years after leaving Spain.
To top it off, how roses of any kind could have been growing in the arid, frozen rocky soil of Tepayac Hill is astonishing enough, but it seems to me that Blessed Juan Diego would have desired with all his heart to protect the beautiful ARRANGEMENT of these beautiful flowers, for to him they were the work of beautiful hands of the most beautiful lady he had ever seen.
There is one more piece to the puzzle. I read an account which described Juan Diego being told to wait outside the bishop's quarters when he first arrived with the roses hidden inside his handmade tilma. He was a merchant who made tilmas of this cactus fiber as a trade, and therefore was actually a businessman, not an ignorant peasant. While he was kept waiting he sat on a seat or bench outside the bishop's door. While he was there, the guards surrounding him teased him, and demanded to see what he was hiding under his cloak, but Juan Diego tried again and again to keep the malicious prying eyes of the guards from seeing what he concealed. But that did not stop the disrespectful guards, who proceeded to pull Juan Diego's arms away so they could take a look. All present, including Juan Diego were then shocked to see that every time the guards pulled his hand or hands away, the hidden roses instantly transformed into a PICTURE of flowers on his tilma, not real flowers. This unbelievable prodigy would have upset Juan Diego, making him very worried that something was amiss. He was very likely becoming a nervous wreck under this taunting by the guards, for fear that he would fail in his mission and that he would be unable to deliver this literal "proof" sent by the glorious Lady to the bishop.
I have spent some years contemplating the likely subjective state of Blessed Juan Diego on this very stressful occasion. Blessed Juan Diego had a wife, with whom he lived in mutually agreed chastity, and he and his wife were said to be virgins. They had no children, and later Juan Diego would live out his years as a tour guide at the new Church on the hill, telling all comers his story first hand.
Therefore, when he was finally given access to the bishop, his moment had arrived and he was certainly on edge with concerns for what new prodigy may occur next. So when he finally stood before the bishop, as the reflection in the eyes of the Image show, and he cautiously (no doubt!) opened his tilma, he would have been intently looking at the fabric behind the roses for fear that something might then appear that he would not have expected, since he had just witnessed the roses being instantly transformed outside before the guards. But this time, what he saw instead was the miraculous Image of the beautiful Lady herself appear, in all her splendor, just as he had seen her with his own eyes, arranging the flowers.
Finally, he would have been wholly intent on protecting the arrangement, but no decidedly concentrated effort of his could have prepared him for what he saw appear, and it was therefore this jolt like a lightening bold surging through his body's nervous system from the top of his head to the tips of his toes and fingers, his astonishment and shock overcame him and this is what caused him to lose focus long enough to accidentally drop the flowers. Because without such a surprise he would never have let them fall to the floor.
And it seems to me that is why the flowers fell.
I'm not done.
After the Church was built and some 10 million Mexicans had lined up for as many years, patiently waiting in line as far as the eyes could see for their turn to kneel before the Image, receive the Faith in one moment, and spontaneously request to be baptized, and the priests of Bishop Zumarraga had worn their hands raw baptizing day and night with barely time to rest briefly and say Mass before returning to their sacramental duty year after year, after all that, Rome was reluctant to give her blessing to the veneration of the
miraculous Image not made by human hands. It would not be until 135 years, in A.D. 1666, when Rome would ultimately yield to the longstanding tradition of countless miracles in the name of
La Virgen de Guadalupe. Among the non-negotiable requirements Rome demanded were two things. First, some written official record at the time was necessary, and this was found in one of the dusty old books in the Vatican archives, which was in the form of one line of text, written in typical Latin abbreviations. I don't have a copy of it, but I saw it somewhere, and it was nothing remarkable, nothing that would seem to be important if one does not know what the abbreviations mean. But it was enough for the first item.
Second, Rome demanded a personal testimony of a living witness. This was supplied by an old man who explained to the Roman officials that when he was a young boy, he knew an old man who told him that when he, this second old man, had been a child, he knew an old man (a third old man) who told him the story of when HE was a young boy, he had seen an old Aztec man who would walk the streets of Mexico City; each time as he passed a shrine to the Virgin of Guadalupe, he would exclaim in his native Nahuatl language words to the effect as follows:
"I though unworthy, saw her with my eyes, and she, Our Lady, threw dust in them." This native Aztec man had been a soldier in the Aztec army when one day they had faced the advancing Spanish soldiers on a battlefield. The Aztecs used a military method similar to that of ancient Romans, with a short sword that they would jab upwards at their enemy while crouching down to avoid being harmed by enemy swords. The point is, military commentators have said that the Aztecs, while without gunpowder like the Spanish had, still should have had the advantage and would have won the battle. However, this one surviving Aztec soldier said that he and his comrades had seen in the sky above the Spanish, the very Lady as she appears on the Tilma of Juan Diego, and this Lady had made a sweeping motion with her arm, throwing a mysterious dust at the Aztec army, which momentarily blinded them, and so they had been overcome by the Spanish.
The Roman officers verified that indeed such a battle had taken place, sometime around 1520, which would have been many years before 1531. They had not known why it was that the Spanish had won the battle. But now the mystery was solved.
Topic: Ten Amazing Facts about the image of our Lady of Guadalupe (Read 861 times)