Pope’s visit a nod to patron saint
Pontiff will stop at the Basilica of the Virgin of Guadalupe
MEXICO CITY — A weathered pastel image of the Virgin of Guadalupe hangs from German Herrera Hernandez’s dashboard, watching over his passengers from her perch next to his cigarettes, gum and the handful of coins he uses to make change.
“We believe in her,” said Herrera, a 55-year-old who has been driving a cab in Mexico City for about a decade. “She protects us, wherever we go.”
When Pope Francis visits this week he’ll make an emotional stop at the Basilica of the Virgin of Guadalupe — patron saint of Mexico and “empress of the Americas” — where millions of pilgrims flock each year to pray before the shroud that bears her image.
But she’s also an everpresent part of life for millions of people like Herrera, not just at the basilica. Across the country, in private homes and public marketplaces, she gazes down beneficently from the walls of taco stands and police stations, from hair salon mirrors and even outside no-tell motels.
In poor barrios and posh shopping districts, perhaps nothing unites Mexicans more than their reverence for the Virgin.
Grieving families light candles beneath her likeness in shrines to dead relatives, while young hipsters shell out big bucks for shirtsleeve tattoos of the Virgin.
“There’s the old refrain in Mexico that Mexicans are 90 percent Catholic and 100 percent Guadalupan,” said Andrew Chesnut, chair in Catholic studies at Virginia Commonwealth University. “If there’s one main constituent element of Mexican-ness, it’s Guadalupe, because she obviously transcends the religious realm. ... So she sells products, she’s tattoos, (even with) people who aren’t necessarily her devotees.”
According to tradition, the dark-skinned virgin appeared before the Indian peasant Juan Diego in 1531 at Tepeyac, a hillside near Mexico City where Aztecs worshipped a mother-goddess, and her image was miraculously imprinted on his cloak.
The image helped priests inculcate Catholicism among indigenous Mexicans during Spanish colonial rule, and the church later made her patron of all the Americas. Juan Diego was canonized as the hemisphere’s first Indian saint in 2002 during the papacy of John Paul II.