Our Lady of Guadalupe and Sudan - an Afterthought

December 12 is the feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe, the patroness of our community, the Franciscan Friars of the Renewal. Unfortunately that day I didn’t have much time to reflect on its significance for my current situation. I celebrated an early morning Mass with a few local lay people, and then set out to travel south towards the border of Kenya, and on to Nairobi. We had a little trouble getting started because the battery in the vehicle we were to use had died, but with a combination of some charging from other vehicles and pushing and popping the clutch of the Land Cruiser, after about an hour we succeeded in getting on the road. There followed about five hours of inhaling dust as we traversed the extremely dry unpaved roads of Southern Sudan. We arrived in Lokichoggio just in time to catch the daily flight to Nairobi.

In retrospect, though, there are some significant parallels between the current situation in Southern Sudan and the circumstances in which Our Lady appeared to Juan Diego in 1531. The Southern Sudanese of today and the Aztecs of Juan Diego’s time share the experience of living in the aftermath of war. The Aztecs were decimated by the Spaniards. It’s estimated that 100,000 died during the siege of Mexico City, and another 100,000 died of disease afterwards. The Aztecs experienced the apocalypse of and utter contempt toward their culture and civilization – perhaps that’s why Our Lady appeared to them resembling the woman in chapter 12 of the Apocalypse: surrounded by the sun, with the moon under her feat and clothed in the stars.

Approximately 2,000,000 Southern Sudanese died in the course of the 22 year civil war between the north and the south. The war was fueled by the ethnic and religious antipathy of the Arab Islamic north toward the black Christian south, and resulted in terrible and widespread destruction.

Our Lady of Guadalupe affirmed the value of the Aztec people and their culture and brought hope into a situation of despair and darkness, enabling them to rebuild for the future. May she do the same for our hard-pressed Sudanese brothers and sisters, and obtain for them through her powerful intercession a secure and lasting peace.