December 12 · Catholic · traditional calendar

Our Lady of Guadalupe 2026 (December 12): the story, the image and the feast

Our Lady of Guadalupe is kept on December 12, a Saturday in 2026. Here is the 1531 story of Juan Diego as the Nican Mopohua tells it, the historical debate, what is reported about the image, and how the feast is kept.

Era: 1531

December 12, 2026: how the feast is kept

December 12, 2026 falls on a Saturday. In the Catholic Church's General Roman Calendar the day is an optional memorial, inscribed by a decree of the Congregation for Divine Worship dated September 28, 2002; St Juan Diego is an optional memorial three days earlier, on December 9 (a Wednesday in 2026). In the apostolic exhortation Ecclesia in America, signed in Mexico City on January 22, 1999, John Paul II welcomed the synod's proposal that the feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe, Mother and Evangelizer of America, be celebrated throughout the continent on December 12, and recalled the synod prayer that invokes her as Patroness of all America. In the United States the day ranks as a feast: the bishops' 2026 calendar lists Saturday, December 12 with the readings Zechariah 2:14–17 or Revelation 11:19a; 12:1–6a, 10ab, and the Gospel Luke 1:26–38 or Luke 1:39–47. (Zechariah 2:14–17 in the Catholic numbering is 2:10–13 in the five Bibles on this site.) In Mexico the bishops keep December 12 as a solemnity and a holy day of obligation (ACI Prensa, September 20, 2021), although it is not one of the official rest days of the Federal Labour Law (Expansión, December 11, 2023). At the basilica in Mexico City, Expansión reported that about 12.8 million pilgrims had arrived by 7 p.m. on December 12, 2025, a record according to the authorities, who counted arrivals with cameras on the Calzada de Guadalupe (Expansión, December 13, 2025). On October 12, 2026 the basilica opened a jubilee year for the fiftieth anniversary of the new basilica, dedicated on October 12, 1976; the jubilee was granted by Pope Leo XIV, and a plenary indulgence can be gained under it until October 12, 2027 (Excélsior, October 11, 2026; InfoVaticana, September 14, 2026).

The story the Nican Mopohua tells

The best-known account is a Nahuatl narrative named after its opening words, Nican mopohua, "here it is told". What follows is a summary, not a translation. Early on Saturday, December 9, 1531, Juan Diego, a baptised Nahua man, was walking past the hill of Tepeyac on his way to church when he heard singing and a voice calling his name from the hilltop. There he found a radiant young woman. She told him she was the ever-virgin Holy Mary, mother of the true God, and asked that a temple be built for her on the plain below. Juan Diego took the message to Bishop Juan de Zumárraga, who listened but did not believe him. On Sunday he went back; the bishop asked for a sign. On Monday Juan Diego's uncle, Juan Bernardino, fell gravely ill, and early on Tuesday, December 12, Juan Diego set out to fetch a priest, taking the other side of the hill so as to avoid the lady. She met him all the same, reminded him that she, his mother, was there with him, and said his uncle was already healed. She sent him up the barren hilltop, where he found Castilian roses in bloom in December. He gathered them into his tilma, the cloak he wore, and carried them to the bishop. When he opened it the flowers fell out and the image of the Virgin was seen on the cloth. The bishop knelt, kept the cloak in his chapel, and a first chapel was begun at Tepeyac. Juan Bernardino, found well, said the lady had appeared to him too and told him that her image should be called the ever-virgin Holy Mary of Guadalupe. According to the Holy See's biography, Juan Diego, whose Nahuatl name Cuauhtlatoatzin means "the talking eagle", was born in 1474 and died in 1548. John Paul II beatified him at the basilica on May 6, 1990 and canonized him in Mexico City on July 31, 2002, calling him the first indigenous saint of the American continent.

Where the account comes from

According to the classicist Andrew Laird, there is no firm evidence that the full narrative existed before it was printed in 1649, which is why its history is argued over. The first printed account was in Spanish, by the priest Miguel Sánchez, in 1648. In 1649 Luis Laso de la Vega, vicar of the shrine at Guadalupe, printed a Nahuatl book, Huei tlamahuiçoltica ("great miracle"), whose central narrative is the Nican mopohua. The book appeared under Laso's name, but later writers credited the narrative to Antonio Valeriano, a Nahua scholar of the Franciscan college at Tlatelolco who served as judge and governor in Mexico City for more than thirty years and died in 1605. In 1675 Luis Becerra Tanco linked a "Juan Valeriano" with the story, and Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora said a manuscript of the miracles written by Antonio Valeriano had existed. Historians such as Mariano Cuevas, E. J. Burrus and Edmundo O'Gorman accepted the attribution, and Miguel León-Portilla proposed that Valeriano wrote the account around 1556 as a poetic work rather than a chronicle. Laird argued in 2016, from a Latin letter of 1561 that he identifies as Valeriano's, that Valeriano cannot have written it. In 1883 the historian Joaquín García Icazbalceta took Laso to be the author, abridging Sánchez's account into Nahuatl. The standard English translation, by Lisa Sousa, Stafford Poole and James Lockhart (1998), is under copyright and is not quoted here.

The debate over the history

The argument began within twenty-five years of 1531. On the feast of Mary's Nativity, September 8, 1556, the Franciscan provincial Francisco de Bustamante preached in the chapel of San José in Mexico City, before the clergy, the viceroy and the court, against the new devotion at the Tepeyac chapel. As the record of his sermon reports it, he said that telling the Indians that an image painted by the Indian Marcos worked miracles would undo what the missionaries had taught them about images, and he accused the archbishop of spreading false miracles. Archbishop Alonso de Montúfar, Zumárraga's successor, opened an inquiry the next day; it was left unfinished and Bustamante was not punished. That record became a key document for doubters. In 1883 the historian Joaquín García Icazbalceta wrote a letter on the question at the insistence of Archbishop Pelagio Antonio de Labastida y Dávalos. He argued from the 1556 inquiry and from the silence of Zumárraga's writings and the early chroniclers that the apparition story was unknown before Sánchez's book of 1648, and asked that the letter go no further; a copy was nevertheless translated into Latin and printed without his name, and a Spanish version appeared in 1892. Defenders point to other evidence: the 1910 Catholic Encyclopedia cites sworn testimony gathered in inquiries prepared for Rome (1663, 1666, 1723 and 1750), the chronicler Bernal Díaz's mention in 1568 of Guadalupe and its daily miracles, and pilgrimages almost without interruption since 1531–32. The question reached the shrine itself in 1996, when Guillermo Schulenburg, abbot of the basilica since 1963, was reported questioning the historical existence of the apparition and of Juan Diego; in October 1996 the National Catholic Register reported that a pastoral team would replace him. The canonization of 2002 went ahead.

The image on the tilma

The 1910 Catholic Encyclopedia describes the cloth as a coarse plant fibre, probably maguey, in two strips about 70 by 18 inches joined by a weak stitch, with a seam running up the middle that turns aside from the face. The colours are gold in the rays and stars, blue-green in the mantle and rose in the robe, with an angel beneath the crescent moon. The same article notes that painters had questioned the canvas and seemed to see oil, watercolour and distemper on the one figure, while admiring its colour and proportions. Later claims are reported here, not endorsed. In 2012 EWTN reported the view of the Peruvian researcher José Aste Tönsmann, who said he had studied the image for 34 years, that thirteen tiny figures can be seen in the eyes. One event is well recorded: on November 14, 1921 a bomb hidden in a flower arrangement on the altar of the old basilica exploded a few feet from the image. The altar steps were damaged and a heavy iron and bronze crucifix was bent, but the image and its glass were unharmed; the crucifix is displayed in the new basilica as the "Holy Christ of the Attack" (Catholic News Agency, November 2022). Bible Daybook takes no position on scientific claims about the cloth.

Revelation 12 and the Magnificat

The image shows a woman standing on a crescent moon, surrounded by golden rays, with stars on her mantle, and the 1910 Catholic Encyclopedia reads it as the Immaculate Conception because it matches the woman of Revelation 12. Revelation 12:1 reads: "And a great sign appeared in heaven: a woman clothed in the sun, with the moon under her feet and a crown of twelve stars on her head" (BSB). The King James Version calls it "a great wonder", the American Standard Version has "a woman arrayed with the sun", and the Douay–Rheims of 1582 numbers it Apocalypse 12:1. Readings differ. Pope Pius X wrote in 1904 that the woman signifies the Virgin Mary, and the US Catholic Mass for December 12 offers Revelation 11:19a; 12:1–6a, 10ab as one choice for its first reading. The Presbyterian commentator Matthew Henry (1662–1714) read her as the church, the spouse of Christ. The feast's Gospel options come from Luke 1, and its second option, Luke 1:39–47, opens Mary's song, the Magnificat (Luke 1:46–55), whose words suit the story of a poor man sent to a bishop: "From now on all generations will call me blessed" (1:48) and "He has brought down rulers from their thrones, but has exalted the humble" (1:52, BSB).

How other Christians see Guadalupe

Catholics honour images for the one they represent, not for the image itself; the Baltimore Catechism sets out that teaching in lesson 31. Many Protestants see the matter differently. Already in 1556, witnesses at Montúfar's inquiry said, Franciscans cited against the devotion the Scriptures that command worship of God alone, and Protestants who object today point to the commandment against making images and bowing down to them (Exodus 20:4–5). U.S. Catholic summarised the range in 2016: evangelicals by and large find no warrant in Scripture for a privileged place for Mary, and Pentecostals honour her as the mother of Jesus but give her no larger role in salvation, while some Mexican American converts keep a private devotion to Guadalupe. In Episcopal and Lutheran churches, the same article noted, Guadalupe devotions increasingly appear in liturgy, song and feast-day processions, largely because of a growing Hispanic population, though their leaders reject the idea of Mary as mediator. The Lutheran liturgist Maxwell E. Johnson, an ELCA pastor who taught at the University of Notre Dame, explored in The Virgin of Guadalupe: Theological Reflections of an Anglo-Lutheran Liturgist (2002) how she might be received into Protestant tradition. Whatever one concludes about Tepeyac, the account itself points to the Magnificat: God looks on the lowly.