What happened at Tepeyac?
The account the Basilica of Guadalupe calls the most important is the Nican Mopohua, "Here it is told," written in Náhuatl, the language of the Aztecs, and attributed to Antonio Valeriano, an indigenous scholar who lived from 1520 to 1605. The Basilica's summary of the events runs as follows.
Early on Saturday, December 9, 1531, an indigenous Christian named Juan Diego was walking to Mass when he heard birdsong on the hill of Tepeyac and a voice calling his name. A young woman stood there and spoke to him in his own language. In the Basilica's Spanish she says she is the perfect ever-Virgin Holy Mary, who has the privilege of being Mother of the most true God, and she asks that a little house, a temple, be built for her there, and sends him to the bishop. Bishop Juan de Zumárraga, a Franciscan, did not believe him. That evening Juan Diego begged the Lady to send someone more important; she sent him back. On December 10 the bishop asked for a sign. On December 11 Juan Diego did not come, because his uncle Juan Bernardino was dying. Before dawn on December 12 he went around the hill to fetch a priest and avoid the Lady, and she met him anyway. Her words at that moment, in the Basilica's text: "What frightened you and distressed you is nothing; do not let your face or your heart be troubled." And then: "Am I not here, I who have the honor of being your mother?" She told him his uncle was already well, sent him to the top of the hill for flowers, and arranged them in his tilma, his cloak (ayate) of plant fiber. At midday, before the bishop, he opened it. The roses fell, and on the cloth, the Basilica says, "at that very instant it became a sign; the venerated image suddenly appeared." The same morning the Lady appeared to Juan Bernardino, healed him, and gave her name, Holy Mary of Guadalupe.
Pius XII, speaking by radio to Mexico in 1945, told it the way the Church tells it: on the tilma of poor Juan Diego, "as tradition relates," brushes not of this earth left a most sweet image. John Paul II wrote in Ecclesia in America that the appearance of Mary to the native Juan Diego in 1531 "had a decisive effect on evangelization," and Franciscan Media reads the whole event as a sign that God accepts all peoples. Juan Diego, born around 1474 at Cuauhtitlán and named Cuauhtlatoatzin, "the eagle that speaks," gave up his land and lived in a hut beside the chapel, sweeping it, until he died in 1548. John Paul II beatified him in 1990 and canonized him at the Basilica on July 31, 2002, calling him the first indigenous saint of the American continent.
Why Catholics pray to Our Lady of Guadalupe for the family, in pregnancy and for protection
Catholics across the continent call her Patroness of the Americas, but no papal act naming her so was consulted for this page, so it is listed here as traditional. Ecclesia in America, John Paul II's exhortation of January 22, 1999, quotes the prayer of the bishops' Synod that invokes her as "Patroness of all America and Star of the first and new evangelization," and welcomes the bishops' proposal that her feast be kept across the whole continent on December 12. The next day, at the Basilica, the Pope announced that he had declared it so, with the rank of feast, and entrusted the continent's future to her as "Lady and Mother of America." Pius XII in 1945 had already called her, in his own voice, "the Empress of America and Queen of Mexico."
Pregnancy and the unborn are a different kind of patronage, traditional and recent. It rests on the image, which shows her wearing a black sash, the sign of pregnancy among the native people, as the Archdiocese of Denver's newspaper explains; and it rests on what John Paul II prayed before the tilma in 1999: "For all who have been conceived in their mother's womb, for street children, for Guadalupe!" and "May the Continent of Hope also be the Continent of Life!" No pope has issued a decree naming her patroness of the unborn.
The family patronage is simply her words. She asked Juan Diego what was troubling him and told him not to let his heart be troubled. Pope Francis, preaching on her feast in 2018, quoted the same line, "Am I not here, who am your Mother?", and called her mother of a fruitful and generous land. At Juan Diego's canonization John Paul II turned to the new saint and asked him to bless families and strengthen spouses in their marriage. A woman afraid in pregnancy, a couple who have lost a child, a household where the money or the peace has run out, a family split by a border: these are the people who go to Tepeyac.
How to pray to Our Lady of Guadalupe
Her feast is December 12. In the United States it is a Feast on the calendar; on the General Roman Calendar it is an optional memorial; in Mexico and across America it is kept as a feast by John Paul II's declaration. December 9, the day of the first apparition, is the optional memorial of St. Juan Diego, so the nine days before December 12 hold them both. The Basilica in Mexico City keeps the tilma and publishes the Nican Mopohua on its website.
Say the prayer below and then say her own line back to yourself, slowly. If you are pregnant, pair the prayer with every prenatal visit; Mary healed Juan Bernardino and also let Juan Diego go for a priest. If you have lost a child, the site's guide on miscarriage is written for you, and so is a priest. If the trouble is a marriage or a child who has gone far away, bring it to Confession and to Mass, and keep asking. She did not promise Juan Diego that nothing would go wrong. She promised to be there.