Homily for Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe

Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe

Dec. 12, 2024
Zech 2: 14-17
Christian Brothers, St. Joseph’s Residence, N.R.

Guadalupe Shrine, St. Joseph's Church
New Rochelle 2021

“Many nations shall join themselves to the Lord on that day, and they shall be his people, and he will dwell among you” (Zech 2: 15).

When the Virgin Mary appeared in 1531 to Juan Diego, humble campesino, member of a conquered race—barely a decade after Cortez’s conquest—she demonstrated God’s care for him, for his sick uncle, and for all their people.  With her mestizo features, she assumed the appearance of that conquered race.  Her pregnant appearance showed that her child also belonged to that race; that they identified with the lowly, the campesinos, the dispossessed, the downtrodden.

As today’s collect notes, she took these people under her singular protection.  The conquered peoples of the Americas also are God’s people, as much as the conquering Spaniards.  Thru the son to be born of pregnant Mary, God dwells among them.

John Paul II added the OL of Guadalupe to the Roman calendar as an optional memorial.  Writing of her to the Mexican people in 1970, St. Paul VI drew from her story the message that Mary’s devotees must be concerned to elevate all the lowly, all the world’s Juan Diegos—thru education, dignified work, meeting the needs of every brother and sister of Christ, including all those “placed at the margins of the advantages of civilization and progress.”  He said that 43 years before the election of Francis, the Pope of the margins.

Brothers, we are religious of the marginalized.  That’s essential to your charism and to Don Bosco’s.  You here are on the margins, I’d say, and so it’s a privilege as well as a duty for me to come to you twice a week.  But even here you continue your ministry for the marginalized people of the world by your prayers for your brothers and Edmund’s associates who are in direct ministry and by your prayers for migrants and refugees, for those afflicted by violence and natural disasters, for the persecuted, for the young who are searching for meaning in their lives—for all who, at least implicitly, long for God to dwell with them.  Thus you identify with OL of Guadalupe and thru her with her Son.