There is a beautiful sanctuary in Spain that is home to the image of the Mother of God under the title of The Virgin of Guadalupe. In the Moorish language the word Guadalupe means “river of light, river of love” and is the name of the river next to which the miraculous statue was discovered.
Tradition relates that the statue was carved by St. Luke the evangelist in the early years of the Church. It later came into the possession of Pope St. Gregory the Great who in turn gave it as a gift to the archbishop of Seville, St. Leander. When Seville was taken by the Moors in the year 711, the statue was buried in a cave in the hills of Extremadura, Spain near the Guadalupe River to hide it from the enemy. It was rediscovered in the year 1326 by a humble cow herder Gil Cordero who had gone into the hills in search of one of his cows. Gil relates that “suddenly the Virgin Mary appeared and instructed me to go to the local priest and to the people, and tell them that it was her wish that they should come and remove the stones that obstructed the cave, dig inside the cave and there they would find an image. She wanted a chapel erected on this spot, and in time she would make of the shrine a center of her heavenly power and protection.” Gil did as The Blessed Mother had asked and in the cave they found a perfectly preserved statue along with documents that gave the date of the statue’s concealment which was more than six hundred years before.
A sanctuary to the Virgin was built on the site of the vision and later a monastery was also built. It was to this shrine that Queen Isabella came to pray to the Virgin of Guadalupe in 1492 for guidance on whether to finance the expedition of Christopher Columbus, and it was in the monastery that she and King Ferdinand of Spain signed the documents that authorized Columbus’ voyage to the New World. Christopher Columbus also came to this sanctuary to pray to the Virgin of Guadalupe asking for her special protection for him and his men on their journey and he renamed his mother-ship the “Santa Maria” in honor of The Virgin of Guadalupe. Upon his return to Spain, Columbus brought with him some Native American’s who were baptized into the Faith at the spring of the sanctuary of Our Lady of Guadalupe. These were the first converts to Christianity from the New World.
It would be of interest to also note here the names of his (Christopher Columbus’) three ships ; the “Pinta,” the “Nina,” and the “Santa Maria.” The Spanish word “Pinta” is a derivative of the verb “pintar” meaning to “paint,” “Nina” means “young girl, and “Santa Maria” is “Holy Mary.” To put these three words together we can literally say that : He (God) paints the young girl, Holy Mary. These were the three ships that Columbus and his men sailed when they came to discover the New World, and it seems to prefigure the apparition of Our Lady to Juan Diego in 1531 on the hills of Tepeyac, outside of Mexico City where she left her image “painted” on his tilma.
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