14 Facts About Juan Diego

Juan Diego Cuauhtlatoatzin, known as Juan Diego, was a Chichimec peasant and Marian visionary.

Juan Diego is the first Catholic saint indigenous to the Americas.

Juan Diego was beatified in 1990 and canonized in 2002 by Pope John Paul II, who on both occasions traveled to Mexico City to preside over the ceremonies.

Juan Diego's wife died two years before the apparitions, although one source claims she died two years after them.

Juan Diego delivered the request, but was told by the bishop to come back another day after he had had time to reflect upon what Juan Diego had told him.

Later the same day: returning to Tepeyac, Juan Diego encountered the Virgin again and announced the failure of his mission, suggesting that because he was "a back-frame, a tail, a wing, a man of no importance" she would do better to recruit someone of greater standing, but she insisted that he was whom she wanted for the task.

Juan Diego agreed to return to the bishop to repeat his request.

Juan Diego returned immediately to Tepeyac and, encountering the Virgin Mary reported the bishop's request for a sign; she condescended to provide one on the following day.

Juan Diego assured him that Juan Bernardino had now recovered and she told him to climb the hill and collect flowers growing there.

On gaining admission to the bishop in Mexico City later that day, Juan Diego opened his mantle, the flowers poured to the floor, and the bishop saw they had left on the mantle an imprint of the Virgin's image which he immediately venerated.

The next day Juan Diego found his uncle fully recovered, as the Virgin had assured him, and Juan Bernardino recounted that he too had seen her, at his bed-side; that she had instructed him to inform the bishop of this apparition and of his miraculous cure; and that she had told him she desired to be known under the title of Guadalupe.

Valeriano was one of the best Indian scholars at the College of Santiago de Tlatelolco at the time that Juan Diego was alive; he was proficient in Spanish as well as Latin, and a native speaker of Nahuatl.

The primary doubts about the historicity of Juan Diego arise from the silence of those major sources who would be expected to have mentioned him, including, in particular, Bishop Juan de Zumarraga and the earliest ecclesiastical historians who reported the spread of the Catholic faith among the Indians in the early decades after the capture of Tenochtitlan in 1521.

The Virgin's own words to Juan Diego as reported by Sanchez were equivocal: she wanted a place at Tepeyac where she can show herself,.