"In December 1531 on the hill of Tepeyac in what is present-day Mexico City an Indian named Juan Diego beheld an apparition of the Mother of God. With the attire and features of an Indian maiden and addressing Juan Diego in his native tongue she instructed him to tell the bishop to build a shrine on that spot. As a sign she left her image on his cloak - the miraculous image of Our Lady of Guadalupe." "Drawing on a lifetime of reflection Father Virgil Elizondo has written Guadalupe, an account of the story and meaning of one of the most powerful religious symbols of our day. For centuries Guadalupe has served as one of the sustaining symbols of Mexican, Latin American, and U.S. Hispanic identity and spirituality. But more than that, in this lyrical and inspiring work Elizondo shows that Our Lady of Guadalupe has an even wider significance and relevance to the church universal at the dawn of a new millennium."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

A profound, poetic, and inspiring reflection on the meaning of Our Lady of Guadalupe, the apparition to the Indian Juan Diego in Mexico City in 1531.

In The Virgin of Guadalupe, Lutheran minister Maxwell Johnson recognizes that the tradition of the Virgin of Guadalupe is not only important to Latin American Catholics, but to all Latin American Christians. Johnson considers the Virgin of Guadalupe from a Lutheran perspective and looks at ways in which she might be received into the evangelical or Protestant tradition.

Nearly a decade after Spain's conquest of Mexico, the future of Christianity on the American continent was very much in doubt. Confronted with a hostile colonial government and Native Americans wary of conversion, the newly-appointed bishop-elect of Mexico wrote to tell the King of Spain that, unless there was a miracle, the continent would be lost. Between December 9 and December 12, 1531, that miracle happened, and it forever changed the future of the continent. It was then that the Virgin Mary famously appeared to a Native American Christian convert on a hilltop outside of what is now Mexico City. The image she left imprinted on his cloak or tilma has puzzled scientists for centuries, and yet Our Lady of Gudalupe’s place in history is profound. A continent that just months before the apparitions seemed completely lost to Christianity suddenly and inexplicably embraced it by the millions. Our Lady of Guadalupe's message of love replaced the institutionalized violence of the Aztec culture, and built a bridge between two worlds — the old and the new — that were just ten years earlier engaged in brutal warfare. Today, Our Lady of Guadalupe continues to inspire the devotion of millions. From Canada to Argentina — and even beyond the Americas — one finds great devotion to her, and great appreciation for her message of love, unity and hope. Today reproductions of the Virgin’s miraculous image can be seen throughout North and South America, in churches and homes, on billboards and even clothing apparel. Her shrine in Mexico City, where the miraculous image is housed to this day, is one of the most visited in the world. In Our Lady of Guadalupe: Mother of the Civilization of Love, Anderson & Chavez trace the history of Our Lady of Guadalupe from the sixteenth century to the present discuss of how her message was and continues to be an important catalyst for religious and cultural transformation. Looking at Our Lady of Guadalupe as a model of the Church and Juan Diego as a model for all Christians who seek to answer Christ's call of conversion and witness, the authors explore the changing face of the Catholic Church in North, Central, and South America, and they show how Our Lady of Guadalupe's message was not only historically significant, but how it speaks to contemporary issues confronting the American continents and people today.

The devotion to Our Lady of Guadalupe, based on the story of apparitions of the Virgin Mary to Juan Diego, an Indian neophyte, at the hill of Tepeyac in December 1531, is one of the most important formative religious and national symbols in the history of Mexico. In this first work ever to examine in depth every historical source of the Guadalupe apparitions, Stafford Poole traces the origins and history of the account, and in the process challenges many commonly accepted assumptions and interpretations. Poole finds that, despite common belief, the apparition account was unknown prior to 1648, when it was first published by a Mexican priest. And then, the virgin became the predominant devotion not of the Indians, but of the criollos, who found in the story a legitimization of their own national aspirations and an almost messianic sense of mission and identity. Poole finds no evidence of a contemporary association of the Virgin of Guadalupe with the Mexican goddess Tonantzin, as is frequently assumed, and he rejects the common assertion that the early missionaries consciously substituted Guadalupe for a preconquest deity.

This superb volume provides the first genuinely global one-volume history of the rise and development of the Christian faith. An international team of specialists takes seriously the geographical diversity of the Christian story, discussing the impact of Christianity not only in the West but also in Latin America, Africa, India, the Orient and Australasia.

This book is a powerful first-hand account of religious ministry reaching out to heal the lives of desperate people who come to the United States, often illegally, seeking a better life.