By Michael Patrick O’Brien–
My favorite moment with a Catholic icon—Our Lady of Guadalupe—occurred when I stumbled upon a painting of her and some red December roses a few years ago.
I was attending a law/mediation conference in downtown Los Angeles right before the pandemic started. Between meetings, my wife and I made a mini-pilgrimage from our hotel up to the Cathedral of Our Lady of Angels.
The Cathedral sits on a magnificent hill overlooking the famous art deco LA city hall and the busy Hollywood Freeway. I’d first noticed the church a year earlier when, flying by on the highway at 60 mph, I glanced up and saw floating angels etched on its glass plaza wall.
Spanish architect Jose Rafael Moneo designed and built the eleven story contemporary structure with virtually no right angles. To capture local color, he painted it in the same sunbaked adobe shades of the historic California Franciscan missions.
Although the 2002 building is relatively new, inside we saw Cathedral relics spanning almost the entire history of Christendom. Both St. Vibiana (a martyr from the third century) and To Kill a Mockingbird Oscar-winning actor Gregory Peck (who died in 2003) rest in its vast crypt.
Upstairs, on the main floor, we stumbled upon an art exhibit honoring the feast days of Our Lady of Guadalupe (December 12) and St. Juan Diego (December 9).
That’s when I saw the painting—“The Speaking Eagle, Cuauhtlatohuac” by Los Angeles artist Rick Ortega. The colorful oil canvas depicts the two main characters in an epic Catholic story dating back some 500 years.
In December 1531, an indigenous Mexican peasant named Juan Diego (also known as Cuauhtlatohuac) reported seeing a vision of Mary, the mother of Jesus. He said she’d appeared and spoke to him at Tepeyac hill in Villa de Guadalupe on the outskirts of Mexico City.
The local archbishop was skeptical. He asked for proof.
During her next appearance, Mary told Juan Diego to gather some flowers from the top of Tepeyac. Despite the winter season, the young man found fragrant red Castilian roses—not native to Mexico—in full bloom.
Mary placed the roses in Juan Diego’s tilma (cloak) and told him to take it to the archbishop. When Juan Diego and the archbishop removed the flowers, they discovered a beautiful image of Mary with brown skin imprinted on the cloak.
Today the cloak is associated with several miracles and venerated at the historic Mexican basilica erected on the site of Mary’s appearance. A side chapel in the Los Angeles Cathedral hosts the only known fragment in the United States of Juan Diego’s ayate cloth tilma.
As the only Marian apparition in the Western Hemisphere, Our Lady of Guadalupe holds a special place in the culture and religious life of indigenous peoples, of Mexico, and all of the Americas.
Juan Diego does too. Pope John Paul II canonized him a saint in 2002.
The Rick Ortega oil painting I saw in Los Angeles shows the dramatic moment when the red roses spill from Juan Diego’s cloak to first reveal the now well-known image of Mary.
In the painting, Juan Diego’s eyes are closed. Perhaps he sees—without looking—that both he and his cloak have been transformed forever by the moment.
As a golden eagle spreads its wings behind him, Juan Diego opens his arms wide too, offering his cloak, his story, and his lovely Lady of Guadalupe for the world to embrace too.
I found it to be a compelling invitation. The red roses Ortega created are so bright that when I first saw the painting, I thought they were real flowers in a vase.
I remember the painting every year during mid-December. I’d heard the 500-year old story before, of course, but never really from the vantage point in the art work—the human perspective of Juan Diego.
Ortega’s image of the saint recounts both the ordinary and the wonderful ways we humans encounter the divine, each in our own unique ways.
Unless you happen to be Juan Diego, Heaven does not just hand us roses. In roses, however, we can always glimpse a little bit of Heaven.
Especially in the vivid red December roses of Guadalupe.
*Mike O’Brien (author website here) is a writer and attorney living in Salt Lake City, Utah. Paraclete Press published his book Monastery Mornings, about growing up with the monks at the old Trappist monastery in Huntsville, Utah, in August 2021. The League of Utah Writers chose it as the best non-fiction book of 2022.
