Patronage

Patron Saint of Indigenous peoples

2 saints are venerated as patrons of Indigenous peoples, led by Juan Diego Cuauhtlatoatzin (feast day December 9).

Juan Diego Cuauhtlatoatzin

1474 — 1548 · Feast day: December 9

An indigenous Nahua convert baptized around 1524, Juan Diego experienced four apparitions of Our Lady of Guadalupe on Tepeyac Hill in December 1531. Sent by the Virgin to Bishop Zumárraga as her messenger, he carried Castilian roses in his tilma in the December frost. When he opened his cloak before the bishop, the image of the Virgin was found imprinted on the cloth — the same tilma that has hung in the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe for nearly five centuries.

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Marie of the Incarnation

October 28, 1599 — April 30, 1672 · Feast day: April 30

Marie of the Incarnation left a thriving transport business to enter the Ursulines at thirty-two, drawn by a mystic vision of a wilderness she would later recognize as Canada. She sailed to Quebec in 1639, founded the first girls' school in the New World, mastered four Indigenous languages, and wrote some 8,000 to 20,000 letters — the richest firsthand chronicle of colonial New France that survives.

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