What is the message on Our Lady of Guadalupe’s mantle?
The arrangement of the golden stars on Our Lady’s mantle carries a hidden significance.
The image of Our Lady of Guadalupe is exquisite not only for its artistry and beauty. Each of its elements carries a deep meaning, including the golden stars that adorn the jade-green mantle of Our Lady.
The stars naturally represent her heavenly origins and her role as the Queen of Heaven. But their particular arrangement is just as important.
The stars are positioned exactly as they would have appeared on the morning of December 12th, 1531—when the miraculous image appeared on the tilma of Juan Diego.
And there’s something else. The stars are actually a mirror image of what they would have looked like from an earthly perspective. They are arranged from the perspective of someone looking down upon them—from God’s perspective, as though the Divine Artist had placed them according to His own celestial gaze.
And it’s not only the visible stars that are significant. While no stars appear around Our Lady’s head, if we overlay a (reversed) star map on the image, we find that the Corona Borealis—the Northern Crown—lays perfectly upon her brow. As the book of Revelation says: “…a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars.”
In fact, over Our Lady’s breast is the constellation Virgo—the Virgin. And Leo the Lion is over her womb, where she carries He Whom Scripture names the Lion of Judah.
Truly, only God could have created something so beautiful, so rich in meaning, so perfect in its construction, so theologically profound in its every detail!
Who was Juan Diego?
Today we celebrate the feast of the humble visionary of Guadalupe.
Juan Diego was an Aztec Indian, a member of the Chichimeca people who spoke the language Náhuatl and lived near modern-day Mexico City. He was born in 1474, several decades before the Aztec Empire—with its dreadful gods and human sacrifices—met its match in Hernan Cortes in the 1520s.
In the subsequent evangelization of the region by Franciscan missionaries, Juan and his wife were some of the first converts to Christianity, baptized around 1524.
Juan was a hardworking, simple man, well-respected in his community. He was probably a widower by the time of the apparitions, caring for his aging uncle. He would travel long distances to hear Mass and attend catechesis.
Manuel Arellano’s Virgen de Guadalupe tells the story of the miraculous tilma in the corners
It was on his way to church one day that he met Our Lady. She called him by name:
“Juanito, Juan Diegito.”
She used the affectionate form of his name. She called him “little Juan” or “little Juan Diego.” She spoke to him like a mother to a child, with love and tenderness.
Juan came from a world where such love between a heavenly being and mortal was unheard of. The Aztec Empire into which he was born was a place of cruel, bloodthirsty gods. Their “mother” earth goddess was a ghastly creature. The greatest god, the god of the sun, needed blood to live and bodies to help him fight the night.
But this heavenly Lady was nothing like them. She said:
“My son, I love you. I desire you to know who I am. I am the ever-Virgin Mary; mother of the true God who gives life and maintains its existence…I desire a church in this place where your people may experience my compassion…Here I will see their fears and I will console men and they will be at peace.”
And in a subsequent apparition:
“Am I not here who am your mother? Are you not under my shadow and protection? Am I not your fountain of life? Are you not in the folds of my mantle, in the crossing of my arms? Is there anything else that you need?”
Truly, this was a wondrous new era into which the Mexican people were then entering. Within the first several years after the apparitions, 9 million native Mexicans would convert—the largest mass conversion to the Faith of all time.
As for Juan, he spent the rest of his life in a cell near the chapel where the miraculous tilma was housed on Tepeyac. He swept the floor and talked to the pilgrims that flowed to the place. He died happy and peaceful in 1548.
Remember the wondrous story of Our Lady of Guadalupe and “Juanito” every time you pray her rosary with a Rose Guadalupe Rosary.
