Feast Days · Feast: December 12, 2026 · Published October 16, 2026

Our Lady of Guadalupe: The Story of the Tilma

December 12 is the feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe. In December 1531, on the hill of Tepeyac near Mexico City, the Virgin Mary appeared to St. Juan Diego, a humble Indigenous man who had become a Christian. She spoke to him in his own language, Nahuatl, and asked that a church be built there.

The bishop, Juan de Zumárraga, asked for a sign. Mary sent Juan Diego to the top of the hill in the cold of December, where he found roses blooming. He gathered them in his tilma, his cloak, and when he opened it before the bishop the roses fell out and her image was on the cloth. That tilma still hangs in the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico City, one of the most visited Marian shrines in the world.

In her image she appears as a young woman with dark skin, dressed like a noblewoman of the people she came to, with the sun behind her and the moon under her feet, and a sash that many see as a sign she is with child. Millions came into the Church in the years that followed.

St. John Paul II canonized Juan Diego in 2002. Our Lady of Guadalupe is the Patroness of the Americas, and her feast is kept all across Mexico and the United States, often with mañanitas, roses and Mass before dawn.

A prayer for the day: "Our Lady of Guadalupe, Mother of the Americas, pray for us and for all the families of this land. Amen."

Designs for this feast: Our Lady of Guadalupe Shirt · Guadalupe Shirt · Virgencita Shirt

Related designs: Our Lady Shirts · Catholic Advent Shirts