In 2002, Pope John Paul II canonized Juan Diego Cuauhtlatoatzin (1474–1548), the Nahua visionary of Our Lady of Guadalupe, making him the first Indigenous American saint. For many Mexican devotees, the canonization was more of a bureaucratic formality — welcome but centuries overdue.
While some saints attain this official recognition in a relatively short period following their death, many others, like Juan Diego, do so only after a long, arduous and uphill trek. My dissertation examines Juan Diego’s nearly five-century-long journey to sainthood in the Catholic Church. Tracing this development requires sifting through a great number of sources on Our Lady of Guadalupe and Juan Diego, and simply tracking down the most pertinent sources can be a monumental endeavor. Thanks to the Marian Graduate Student Fellowship, I spent two weeks in the Marian Library in May, poring through more than 40 books and pamphlets and almost 200 newspaper clippings related to Juan Diego.
Two key historical sources for the development of Juan Diego’s hagiographic or saintly image held in the Marian Library are 18th-century editions of Luis Becerra Tanco’s 1675 Felicidad de México en la admirable aparicion de la Virgen Maria N. Señora de Guadalupe, y origen de su milagrosa imagen, que se venera en su santuario extramuros de aquella ciudad (1745) and Francisco de Florencia’s 1688 La Estrella del Norte de México, aparecida al rayar el dia de la luz evangélica en este Nuevo Mundo (1785). These two texts, known for their attempts to spread Guadalupan devotion through a firmer historical basis for the tradition, have been referred to as the third and fourth “gospels of Guadalupe.” These texts mark a shift in the communication of the tradition to Spanish audiences by placing greater emphasis on the life of Juan Diego and his Indigenous identity. Reading and handling these reprintings helped me to imagine the impact these works had in inspiring reverence for Juan Diego.
Significant movement for Juan Diego’s canonization did not arise until the 20th century. The Marian Library houses many pamphlets from the Mexican periodical Juan Diego, started by Father Lauro Lopez Beltrán in the 1940s. Texts like Historicidad de Juan Diego (1946), Virtudes y méritos de Juan Diego (1946), Canonicibilidad de Juan Diego (1948) and Juan Diego, el vidente del Tepeyac (1955) offer insight into how depiction of Juan Diego shifted from an admirable indigenous visionary to a universal model for lay sanctity.
When the Congregation for Causes of Saints accepted Juan Diego’s cause in the 1980s, more texts were published both in support of and against it. While the Marian Library has many of these works in its collection, the most impressive item is its 1989 copy of the positio, or dossier of evidence, titled Mexicana canonizationis servi dei Ioannis Didaci Cuauhtlatoatzin, viri laici (1474-1548). This 800-page document — one of the few copies in the United States — reveals how the promoters presented Juan Diego’s saintly credentials and built a historical case for his reputation for sanctity.
Given views on sanctity and the Indigenous in colonial New Spain and modern Mexico, Juan Diego only gradually came to be regarded as a saint through the centuries. This investigation, undertaken with the help of the Marian Library, reveals that saints come to be recognized according to the social expectations of sanctity of a given period of time.
— Austin Cruz is a doctoral student in the theology program at the University of Notre Dame and the recipient of the 2025 Marian Graduate Student Fellowship.