A New Shrine for the Brown Virgin

They come by the tens of thousands, bringing balloons and flowers and images of the Virgin Mary. At the gateway to the Basilica of the Virgin of Guadalupe, at the northern edge of Mexico City, many of the Roman Catholic pilgrims drop to their knees to shuffle painfully forward as they pray for forgiveness. On any day there are crowds at this most venerated shrine in the Americas, but on Dec. 12, the Day of Guadalupe, the crowds turn into a tidal wave of humanity. This week for the first time the day is being celebrated in a huge new basilica, a structure of such size and strident modernity that it raised some fears among the faithful that the Virgin might forsake her sanctuary.

Shored Up. There was little choice but to build a new shrine. The one erected in 1709 held only 2,000 people, and it was sinking in the spongy soil. The badly cracked structure will now be shored up and preserved as a museum. The new $24 million concrete and marble basilica is supported by 1,000 subterranean pillars and can hold 20,000 people without a single column obstructing the view of the altar. "Thousands of pilgrims want to get a glimpse of Our Lady's image at the same time," explains its architect, Pedro Ramirez Vazquez.

The origin of that image is a parable of Mexican religion, race and national history. It is said that 445 years ago this week the Virgin Mary appeared to an Aztec straw weaver named Juan Diego, who had recently converted to

Christianity. Though the conquistadors had crushed Juan Diego's people ten years before, the Virgin affectionately called him "my son" and said to him in the Aztec tongue: "Here I will offer all my love, my pity, my aid and my protection to the people." She ordered the Aztec to tell the bishop to build a sanctuary to her on a nearby hillside, where the Spanish had destroyed a temple to the Aztec goddess of earth and corn known as the "Little Mother." When the bishop refused, the Virgin made Castilian roses bloom among the hillside rocks, and Juan Diego took them to the bishop in his scrape. When he opened his cloak, it bore a miraculous painting of the Virgin in unmistakably Indian form, with a brown face and black hair. As Graham Greene once wrote, "The legend gave the Indian self-respect; it gave him a hold over his conquerors."

Over the centuries, the original opposition of the church, the skepticism of certain historians and officially inspired waves of violence against church buildings have not halted peasant adoration of the Virgin of Guadalupe. Her brown face adorned the banners of the troops that overthrew Spain and those of Zapata's land-hungry rebels. Today she appears everywhere in Mexico, from cantinas to taxicab dashboards to countless adobes. But the original remains on Juan Diego's cloak in the basilica. The cloak is made of a crude cactus fiber that usually lasts about 20 years; this one is still in perfect condition.

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