Even today, after almost 500 years, the cloth of Juan Diego’s tilma, woven from coarse plant fibers, shows no signs of decay. No other cactus or palm fiber cloths exist from Juan Diego’s time because they naturally fall apart after about twenty years! The colors of the picture of Mary have not faded. They are still bright and clear. In 1936, the German Nobel Prize winner in Chemistry, Richard Kuhn, examined some fibers from the tilma. What he discovered astonished the world. There is no coloring of any kind in the fabric. The color of Mary’s image on the tilma hasn’t penetrated the threads of the actual cloth. This proves that the picture was not painted onto the cloth. Besides that, the materials used to produce what resembles colors are unknown to science.
Millions of people have touched and kissed the tilma, and hardly one of them left without lighting a votive candle to burn beneath it. For centuries, the tilma with its image was also exposed to damp stone, dust, and wind. In 1921, a bomb even exploded right in front of it. But, after all this, the tilma remains undamaged and as new looking as ever.
Our Lady’s image contains an even more astonishing proof that it is authentic. In 1929, a professional photographer named Alfonso Gonzales was enlarging some photographs of the tilma. He looked closely at the Lady’s eyes. To his great amazement, he found reflections of people’s faces there!
In 1951, J. Carlos Salinas Chavaz was using a magnifying glass to examine a photograph of the sacred image’s face. As the lens moved across the Lady’s right eye, Carlos was astonished to see a man staring back at him.
A few years later, Luis Maria Martinez, then the bishop of Mexico City, asked a group of distinguished scientists to examine Mary’s eyes as they appear on the tilma. On December 11, 1955, the news was made public: the scientists had indeed found reflections of people in her eyes.
Many eye doctors and scientists have greatly magnified the image of our Lady’s eyes on the tilma in order to study them more closely. And they have made some astonishing discoveries. When they use the instrument an eye doctor uses to look into a patient’s eyes, they can actually look into the eyes of the picture of Our Lady of Guadalupe and see the same eye structure they find in a living person’s eyes.
Experts have also found that the reflections in Mary’s eyes on the tilma are formed in exactly the same way they would be in a living person’s eyes, at precisely the correct angles, proportions, and distortions. Researchers have compared the people reflected in the eyes of Mary’s image to paintings made by artists in Juan Diego’s time. They have confirmed that all four men reflected in the Lady’s eyes were actually present in the room, in 1531, when Juan Diego gave Bishop Zumarraga the flowers from the Blessed Virgin. The largest face visible in Mary’s eyes has been identified as none other than Juan Diego himself.
No matter what the temperature of the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe, where Juan Diego’s tilma is now kept, the custodians there have found that the tilma remains a constant 98.6 degrees, Fahrenheit—the temperature of a healthy human body.
Our Blessed Mother kept the promises she made to Juan Diego, and she continues to offer life and hope to her children all over the world. Mary’s image, enclosed behind glass in a special frame, now hangs over the main altar of the great Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe, not far from Tepeyac Hill in Mexico. Today this basilica is the most popular Marian shrine in the world. Between fifteen to twenty million people visit it every year.
Mary’s image now hangs in her great basilica.
Juan Diego was beatified in Mexico by Pope John Paul II on May 6, 1990. He was canonized—declared a saint—by Pope John Paul II in Mexico on July 31, 2002. The miracle that led to his canonization took place in Mexico City in May of 1990. A troubled young man named Juan Jose Esperanza had suffered very severe head injuries after having jumped from the balcony of his home. He fell three stories to the street below. To the amazement of all the doctors, who told Mrs. Esperanza that her son was not going to live, Juan Jose quickly and completely recovered! Mrs. Esperanza had begged Juan Diego to intercede with God to save her son as he was falling to the ground.
We celebrate the memorial of Saint Juan Diego every year on December 9, the date on which Mary first appeared to him.
We celebrate the feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe each year on December 12. This is the anniversary of the date on which Mary cured Juan Diego’s uncle.
Holy Mary of Guadalupe, our good Mother, bring us all to Jesus.
Saint Juan Diego, pray for us.