Josephine Nobisso - Saint Juan Diego

Saint Juan Diego

And Our Lady of Guadalupe

Written by

Josephine Nobisso

Illustrated by

Virginia Esquinaldo

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Nobisso, Josephine.
Saint Juan Diego and our Lady of Guadalupe / written by
Josephine Nobisso ; illustrated by Virginia Esquinaldo.
p. cm.
ISBN 0-8198-7064-1 (pbk.)
1. Juan Diego, Saint, ca. 14741548. 2. Guadalupe, Our Lady
of. I. Esquinaldo, Virginia. II. Title.
BX4700.J76 N63 2002
232.91.7097253dc21
2002005836

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Text copyright 2002, Josephine Nobisso

Edition copyright 2002, Daughters of St. Paul

Published by Pauline Books & Media, 50 Saint Pauls Avenue, Boston, MA 02130-3491. www.pauline.org

Printed in the U.S.A.

Pauline Books & Media is the publishing house of the Daughters of St. Paul, an international congregation of women religious serving the Church with the communications media.

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No one knew that when they buried Princess Papantzin she was still alive. Suddenly, the quiet of the lush palace gardens was shattered by her screams from within the damp tomb. Hummingbirds scattered, and spotted leopards yowled in fear. Members of the royal household, who had been mourning her death, came running. Unseal the tomb! they cried, their faces ashen with terror.

Princess Papantzin stumbled out, skin tingling from the effects of the strange dream she had had while in her coma. Alert my brother! she ordered.

Emperor Montezuma II listened wide-eyed as his sister described her experience. My vision was a prophecy meant for you! she exclaimed. In my dream I met a man all made of light. He wore a kind of symbol on his foreheadtwo intersecting black lines. I followed him to the edge of the great sea. We stared into the mists over the water. Suddenly, the fog parted and I gasped at vast canoes that loomed over me, bounding toward the shore.

The vessels were carrying men from a faraway landmen who are our peoples long-awaited messengers from the god, Quetzalcoatl (KETS-ahl-KO-waht). They are the prophesied foreigners who will conquer you, Montezuma. They will finally bring knowledge of the true God to our people, the Aztecs.

I have expected this, the emperor murmured. How shall I know when all you saw is about to be fulfilled?

The billowing white sails of the vessels also bore the symbol of the intersecting lines, Princess Papantzin told her brother. It was as if that symbol itself were the force that drew the great canoes to Mexicos shores.

The symbol? Emperor Montezuma asked. The Mexican tribes already honored a symbol made of two intersecting lines. The vertical line stood for things that descended from the supernatural world, and the horizontal line stood for earthly things. At the point where the two lines touchedthe center of this crossthe Aztecs believed that the worlds of heaven and earth met. So, the emperor reasoned, it is to be by this sign that our empire will fall and the Aztecs will be given a new life!

Princess Papantzin, who had fallen into a coma, was accidentally buried alive in 1505. That was thirteen years after Christopher Columbus had landed in another part of the New World. At that time, the Aztecs of ancient Mexico were still waiting to learn whether any of the many gods they worshipped was the true one. Perhaps, their priests told each other, he will be a god we have failed to acknowledge!

Another prophecy, based on the Aztec calendar, foretold: The hour for gaining knowledge of the one true God will come soon. It will be a time that is both happy and sad, for that hour will also mark the end of our great Aztec culture. Although tremendous changes and upheavals were expected, Emperor Montezuma and the Aztecs looked forward to them. If a nation becomes friends with the one true God, they told each other, it can petition him for all its needs. It will then have security, and its people can live in peace.

Along with their many shrines dedicated to the gods of nature, the Aztecs had erected a great shrine reserved for the true God whom they did not yet know. They called him the God through whom everything lives. But on the pedestal of that vacant temple, no figure or graven image had ever been placed. No one knows whom to honor there, the Aztecs said when they passed it.

Princess Papantzins dream encouraged her brother Montezuma. He had to wait another fourteen years, however, before the prophesied strangers appeared. In 1519, when the thirty-four-year-old Spanish explorer Hernando Cortes landed in what is now Mexico with his band of about 650 Spaniards and a handful of Indians, a rumor reached Montezuma: the Europeans helmets were decorated with a cross!

Bring me one of these helmets! Montezuma commanded. Sure enough, there on its front, was a crossthe very sign his sister had seen in her dream.

God was preparing the moment that would shape the history not only of the new land, called the Americas, but also of the old world in Europe.