Sorry but Im very concerned over this one and have been for years. For instance, I went to mass at a parish I don’t usually go to this Sunday. No mention of the upcoming (tomarrow) celebrations for Our Lady of Guadalupe at all. However, the spanish side of the bulletin had an announcement which was absent on the English side. An insert entitled Program de Actividades Para la Celebracion de Nuestra Senora de Guadalupe 12 de Diciembre, 2011 which spanned 5 days of celebrations was in spanish only. At my home parish things were a little more reserved in the bulletin because presumably the English speakers of all races have been a bit more vocal. For instance, the mexican flag was removed from an OLG shrine because it was brought to the Bishop that the apparition predated Mexico among other things. However in the previous weeks bulletin in spanish only a Novena Guadalupana, Del 01 al 12 de Diciembre, Fiesta de San Juan Diego 09 de Dic and Fiesta de Nuestra Senora de Guadalupe 10 de Dic a las 10:00 p.m. a las 5:00 a.m with something at 11:00 am and mass at 12:10 and 1:45 I think. We never hear about OLG as the Patroness of the Americas.
While OLG is the patroness of the Americas as a whole, we need to remember something about her specialness to Mexicans.
Before OLG’s appearance, most of the Indians and many of the mixed-bloods, were still pagan, and believed in the old gods and legends. There was an Aztec legend that a sort of god-demon named Quetzalcoatl would come some day from the sea and kill them all. Supposedly Quetzalcoatl had a white face, and it wasn’t hard for many Aztecs to think Cortez was, indeed, Quetzalcoatl. Even though the Spaniards were demonstrably human, the notion of Quetzalcoatl and the doom he would bring did not die. Many or most of the natives and mixed people still believed in it. One of Cortez’ soldiers had smallpox, a disease to which few of the natives had any immunity, and it (and other European diseases) literally killed millions, and so it really did seem they were doomed to die, as per the legend of Quetzalcoatl. Since the Spanish weren’t Aztecs, they were not doomed.
When Our Lady appeared in the garb and visage of an Aztec princess, it was astonishing to them that the Mother of God would appear as royalty of a supposedly doomed race. And she spoke to Juan Diego in Nahuatl, the Aztec language. There are some who maintain (and I believe it) that she did not really announce herself as “Our Lady of Guadalupe”, but “The lady coatlashupe”. “Coatalashupe” in Nahuatle means “Conquerer of Quetzalcoatl”. The Spanish had a Shrine in Spain to “Our Lady of Guadalupe”, and the clergy who heard the account from Juan Diego thought that’s what he told them She said.
That was, itself, a bombshell among the natives. It was the Mother of God telling them that, no, they were not doomed. They were not all to die; that she was the conquerer of the demon and would save them, not only from the fearsome and bloodthirsty Aztec gods, but from literally dying out as a people. Conversions literally exploded after that.
So, while She is, indeed, the patroness of all of us, there is a specialness of OLG to Mexicans that is not quite as personal to us. To them, She really is tied to them as a people in a very special way.
Personally, I take no offense in it.
