Isaiah 48:17-19 / Matthew 11:16-19
The saint that the Church remembers and honours today is St. Juan Diego. He was canonized in 2002. He was a native of Mexico, and he is the first Roman Catholic indigenous saint from the Americas.
He was a common person, neither rich or influential, but he was the person chosen to receive the first apparition of Mary hill at Tepeyac on the 9th Dec 1531 and subsequently Mary appeared to him for another three times.
On that day he was on his way for Mass when he was stopped by a beautiful radiant sight of a woman and she requested him to go to the bishop and to tell him to build a chapel on that hill.
When Juan Diego approached the Bishop and told him about the matter, he was asked to come back another time. Later on during the day Juan Diego encountered the Virgin Mary a second time and told her he failed in granting her request. He tried to explain to her he was not an important person, and therefore not the one for the task, but she insisted he was the man chosen for the task.
Juan Diego returned to the Bishop the next day and repeated his request, but now the Bishop asked for proof or a sign the apparition was real and truly of heaven. Mary agreed to give the sign. But after some obstacles here and there, the sign was a miraculous imprinted image of the Virgin Mary on the flower-filled cloak (tilma) of Juan Diego.
After that event, Juan Diego withdrew to a hermitage on the hill and spent the rest of his life in prayer and work and looking after the site of apparition.
Today, the rich and poor alike gather at the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe to experience the blessings of God through the intercession of the Blessed Mother.
As the 1st reading tells us: I, the Lord your God, teach you what is good for you, I lead you in the way that you must go.
St. Juan Diego was humble and willing to listen to the Blessed Mother, and through him God taught us what is good for us. May St. Juan Diego pray for us that we too will be humble and willing to be taught what is good for us.