Traditional prayer
Prayer to Our Lady of Guadalupe
Our Lady of Guadalupe, mystical rose, intercede for the Church, protect the Sovereign Pontiff, help all those who call on thee in their necessities,
and be always the ever-Virgin Mary, Mother of the one true God;
and for the followers of thy Son obtain the preservation of the Faith, a sweet hope in the trials of life, a burning charity, and the precious gift of final perseverance.
Amen.
About this prayer
This prayer comes from the Raccolta, the Church’s old collection of indulgenced prayers, in the English edition of 1930, where a note records that Pope St. Pius X attached an indulgence to it in an audience of 18 August 1908. It asks for everything a mother asks for her household, and asks it of the Mother of the Church: protection for the Church and the Pope, help for everyone in need, and for the followers of her Son the faith kept whole, hope sweet in the middle of trials, charity that burns, and the gift of final perseverance, which is to be found faithful at the end. “He that shall persevere to the end, he shall be saved” (Matthew 24:13, Douay-Rheims). One line needs care: “be always the ever-Virgin Mary, Mother of the one true God” is not a request that she become what she already is. It greets her by two truths the Church confesses of her for ever, that she is ever-Virgin and truly Mother of God (CCC 499, 495), and neither depends on our asking.
The account of Guadalupe is given by the Holy See’s own biography of St. Juan Diego Cuauhtlatoatzin (1474–1548). Baptized as a grown man by a Franciscan, he was walking to Mass on 9 December 1531 when the Blessed Mother appeared to him on Tepeyac Hill, outside what is now Mexico City, and asked that a shrine be built there. The bishop asked for a sign. On 12 December she sent Juan Diego up the hill in winter to gather roses; when he opened his mantle before the bishop, the flowers fell, and an image of the Blessed Mother remained impressed on the cloth. The oldest native account, the Nican Mopohua, was written in Nahuatl by Antonio Valeriano. It is private revelation, which the Church has honoured: St. John Paul II canonized Juan Diego at her basilica on 31 July 2002.
The same biography describes the image, still kept in the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe: a woman with native features and dress, the moon beneath her feet, a blue mantle covered with gold stars, and a black girdle at her waist that signifies she is with child. The Douay-Rheims reads the “woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet” of the Apocalypse (12:1; Revelation 12:1 in modern Bibles) as the Church of God, adding in its note that it “may also, by allusion, be applied to our blessed Lady.” At Tepeyac she came as the Church comes to every people: carrying Christ to those who are still coming to know Him.
St. John Paul II wrote that her appearance to Juan Diego had a decisive effect on the evangelization of the Americas, recalled that she is invoked as Patroness of all America, and welcomed the Synod’s proposal that her feast, as Mother and Evangelizer of America, be kept throughout the continent on 12 December (Ecclesia in America, 11).
When to pray it
- On 12 December, her feast, and through the nine days before it.
- In pregnancy, before an image of the Mother who carries her Child.
- For the Church and the Pope, as the prayer itself asks.
- When faith runs thin in a family: she is asked here for its preservation.
- For the peoples of the Americas, north and south.
Any indulgences named on this page are those recorded in the older prayer books it cites. Pope Paul VI reformed the Church's indulgences in 1967 (Indulgentiarum Doctrina); the current rules are in the Church's Enchiridion of Indulgences.