August 20, 2017 - "Our Lady of Guadalupe"

Today I conclude my reporting of an address to the Napa Institute that Archbishop Jose Gomez of Los Angeles gave earlier this year.  Archbishop Gomez encouraged his audience to recognize the great mission to America that was inspired by Our Lady of Guadalupe and to realize that mission was still continuing.  To this purpose Archbishop presented a spiritual interpretation of the Guadalupe story in light of the present situation in our country.  He sees the story of Guadalupe points to five themes:  vocation, education, life, culture, and family.  He believes that if we look at these themes, they give us a strategy for Christian living and carrying out the Church’s mission in this post-Christian culture.  Last week we look at the themes of vocation, education, and life.  Now we are going to look at the themes of culture and family.
Culture: Archbishop Gomez notes that when we look at the image of Our Lady on the tilma (a cloak made of cactus fibers worn by men among the Aztec and other peoples of central Mexico in the sixteenth century), we notice that she is a brown skinned young woman, a mestizo, a person whose family backgrounds includes a mix of descendants from Europe and indigenous peoples.  She came dressed in the garments of the indigenous peoples and she spoke to Juan Diego in his own indigenous language.  Through this our Blessed Mother shows herself in a powerful way to be an icon of the church.  Our Lady of Guadalupe reminds us that the Church was established to be the vanguard of a new humanity and a new civilization—one family of God drawn from every race and every nation and every language.  The saints of the Americas show us that holiness knows no color.  Beyond the color of our skin or the countries where we come from—we are still brothers and sisters and children of one Father.  And the Mother of God is our Mother.
Family.  The Archbishop remarks that the vision of Guadalupe encourages us to strengthen marriage and the family as the foundations of a truly human civilization.  Juan Diego and his wife Maria Lucia were baptized in 1524.  They were among the first converts in the New World as well as being one of the first Catholic married couples in the Americas.  Maria Lucia died five years after her baptism and two years before Juan Diego’s encounter with Our Lady.  Our Lady of Guadalupe came among us as the Mother of the family of God in the Americas.  Some of the earliest martyrs in this country were missionaries who were killed because of their witness to God’s truth about the meaning of marriage and the family.  These include the Hispanic Franciscans who were martyred in what is now the state of Georgia in 1597 as well as some of the martyrs of Florida.  When I speak of the martyrs of Florida, I mean those Native Americans, religious brothers, and priests were killed in evangelizing the faith in our nation’s colonial land known as La Florida between 1549 and 1761.  It would be good to ask these martyrs for courage as we confront the broad cultural crisis of the family today.  How can we do this?  First of all, we can do it by living the beauty and fullness of the Church’s teaching ourselves.  We need to be models to a culture that is confused.  We need to proclaim by our actions even more than by our words the beautiful truth about the human person and God’s loving plan for creation and the family.
 
Archbishop Gomez cites the example of the servants of God Eugenio Balmori Martinez and Marina Francisca Cinta Sarrelangue from Veracruz, Mexico.  In their letters and poems to each other they expressed a beautiful vision of family, “Our home will be a chapel of love, where no other ideal will reign other than to thank God and to love each other very much.”  There is beauty like this to be found everywhere in our families, our parishes, in the joy of our children.  We need to proclaim this to our culture.
                At the end of his address, Archbishop Gomez quotes the words that Our Lady of Guadalupe spoke to St. Juan Diego:
 
“Do not let your heart be disturbed. Do not fear. ... Am I, your Mother, not here? Are you not under my shadow and protection? Are you not in the folds of my arms? What more do you need?”
 
We need to lay our fears and hopes at the feet of the Virgin.  We need to contemplate these times in which we live under the gaze of her loving eyes. We need to go always forward with confidence because we go with God and with his Mother.
 
Until next week,
Fr. John