Only one archdiocese in the world is known to house a fragment of St. Juan Diego’s tilma, or cloak, that Our Lady of Guadalupe left imprinted with her miraculous image nearly 500 years ago: The Archdiocese of Los Angeles.
“Having this relic continues to be a great blessing for the family of God here in the Archdiocese of Los Angeles,” Archbishop José H. Gomez of Los Angeles told Our Sunday Visitor in emailed reflections ahead of Our Lady of Guadalupe’s feast day on Dec. 12.
He added: “We feel the presence and protection of Our Lady of Guadalupe, and we feel the warmth of her tender care for us, as she promised St. Juan Diego: ‘Am I not here, I who am your Mother? Are you not in my shadow and under my protection? … Do you need anything more?'”
Today, the faithful can venerate this special relic in the Tilma Chapel at The Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels in Los Angeles. The one-centimeter square piece of cloth is located in the heart of a bronze sculpture of St. Juan Diego. At the cathedral, visitors can see the cloth’s weave up close, unlike the full tilma at the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico City.
A self-portrait of Our Lady
Our Lady’s image dates back to 1531, when she appeared to St. Juan Diego at Tepeyac Hill in Mexico. She encountered the peasant man as someone familiar: She looked and spoke like a native woman. Our Lady asked St. Juan Diego to persuade the bishop to build a chapel during a time of conflict between the Spanish and the Indigenous peoples. As a sign, Our Lady instructed St. Juan Diego to gather non-native Castilian roses, which were out of season, for the bishop in his tilma. When the saint presented the flowers, he discovered Our Lady’s image — an image that later sparked millions of conversions.
“I think of the image on the sacred tilma of St. Juan Diego as Our Blessed Mother’s self-portrait, or as a painting of her that God made with his own hand, using roses,” Archbishop Gomez said.
“For me,” he added, “it’s beautiful to reflect on this truth: that God wanted us to see her face, that God wanted us to be able to look into her eyes, that he wanted us to see for ourselves just how much Our Blessed Mother loves us.”
Her image bursts with Aztec and biblical symbolism. Our Lady appears as a young, pregnant woman in front of the sun, with the moon at her feet. Stars hang from her blue-green mantle, and her rose-colored robe places a four-petaled flower, an ancient symbol of the divine, over her womb. A woman of royal status, she looks downward, with her hands clasped in prayer.
Her appearance on the tilma is mestiza, or both Aztec and Spanish, according to the website of the Shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe in La Crosse, Wis, which explains the image.
The image is miraculous for numerous reasons. The tilma’s ayate cloth made of natural agave fibers should have disintegrated hundreds of years ago, the website for The Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels reads. The LaCrosse shrine adds that miniscule images of St. Juan Diego, the bishop and others are reflected in Our Lady’s eyes as they would in a living human’s eyes. The shrine also points out that the stars appear in their exact positions on Dec. 12, 1531, when St. Juan Diego gathered the roses. The image, and how it was created, remains scientifically inexplicable, the shrine says.
A ‘precious gift’
Archbishop Gomez called the relic “a precious gift” and “a reminder every day of our duty to continue the work that the Virgin came to accomplish, the work of evangelizing the Americas.”
“The Virgin was sent in 1531 to open the door of faith in the New World,” he said, “and she entrusted that mission to St. Juan Diego and now she entrusts that mission to each one of us.”
Archbishop Gomez, who dedicated the Tilma Chapel in 2012, also recognized the importance of the history behind the relic.
“I can never forget ‘why’ the relic was given to my predecessor, Archbishop John Cantwell,” he said of the first archbishop of Los Angeles. “It was out of gratitude for his courageous and generous welcome of refugees fleeing the terror and persecution in Mexico in the 1920s.”
Reflecting on the relic, he recalled those who risked their lives to witness to the faith.
“Again, this reminds me, every day, of those words in the Letter to the Hebrews, that our faith has been handed down by a great cloud of witnesses who have gone before us, and that many of those witnesses have testified to their faith in Jesus by the shedding of their blood,” the archbishop said.
“So, this relic is also a reminder of the cost of discipleship,” he added, “and the need for each of us to live our faith and share our faith with joy and courage, impelled by the love of Christ, who loved us and gave himself for us.”
