Editing Fast Fridays: 30 Minutes for God (section)

== Friday, Dec 13: Our Lady of Guadalupe ==
[[File:Statue of Our Lady of Guadalupe and Juan Diego at Juan Diego Catholic School in Draper Utah.jpg|thumb|Statue depicting Juan Diego's encounter with Mary of Guadalupe ]]
December 12 is the Feast Day of Our Lady of Guadalupe. One needn’t be Catholic to appreciate this story, as the aftermath of the events regarding Our Lady of Guadalupe are plainly historical. As happened with Saul of Tarsus, the work of Our Lady of Guadalupe was followed by an explosion in baptisms, the former across Greece and Rome, the latter in Mesoamerica, in both cases deeply impacting human history.

It's worth considering what happened, because something happened. If you don't believe that Saint Paul was kicked off his horse and blinded by the Son of God himself, fine, but it is undeniable that the man had an experience that immediately converted him from primary persecutor of Christians to one of its greatest evangelists.

In December of 1531, something happened in Mexico City that led directly to the conversion of upwards 8 million Amerindians. Meanwhile, here for my writeup on the [https://rejoiceinmary.org/what-is-guadalupe-the-story-of-our-lady-of-guadalupe-the-perfect-virgin/ History of the Virgin of Guadalupe].

What I find most fascinating about this history is that it marks the apex of a mass cultural diffusion that historians and our culture today loathe. Jared Diamond in his "Guns, Germs and Steel" poses a fascinating question: why did the Spanish conquer the Americas, whereas the Americas didn't conquer Spain and the rest of Eurasia?  (The same question can be asked of (or sub-Sahara Africa or Australia). The answer lies in what Diamond flushes out in the book in the geography of the continents, principally that Eurasia provided a variety of domesticable animals that led to development across Eurasia of the technologies that the Inca and Aztec lacked and that the Spanish used to conquer them: guns, germs, and steel. Diamond's insight helps us dismiss notions of cultural superiority, but his hyper-objectivity trips him up on important value judgments, like, heh, Aztecs, you really shouldn't have killed one out of five children from around your empire as offerings to your demonic gods. It doesn't make the crimes of European colonization any better, but it ought to provide a little light on what's ultimately better for people: the sacrifice of the perfect Lamb over that of hundreds of thousands of humans.

The Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe celebrates the gentle, loving side of the Spanish conquest of the Americas, and its perfection in the 
----Some Guadalupe extras:

=== Our Lady of Guadalupe, Extremadura ===
The Monastery of Santa Maria de Guadalupe in Spain holds a "Black Madonna" statue said to have been carved by Saint Luke himself. The statue was found in the early 1300s buried along the Guadalupe River in Extremadura, in the interior of Spain. A herder told priests that the Virgin Mary appeared to him when he was looking for a missing animal, and the priests built a shrine at the spot where the statue was found. Construction on the monastery commenced soon after. 

There, Isabella and Ferdinand signed the authorization for Columbus' first voyage of 1492. The shrine became associated with explorers and voyagers, such as Hernan Cortès, who went on pilgrimages there before their ventures. Columbus' boats, ''La Niña'', ''Pinta'' and ''Santa Maria'', when put as a phrase mean "Little Girl Painted Saint Mary," which many Catholics see as a premonition of the events at Guadalupe. 

=== Battle of Lepanto, 1571 ===
The Holy League leader,  Don Juan of Austria, flew the Virgin of Guadalupe on his master ship. The battle was the largest naval battle ever, and halted Ottoman expansion.

Here for an article on the Battle & its connection to Guadalupe: [https://crisismagazine.com/opinion/guadalupe-at-lepanto Guadalupe at Lepanto - Crisis Magazine]
----How we ended up looking at the US Capitol building and the Washington Monument is a mystery, even to me, but I think I had a purpose: the secularization of religion as expressed in these buildings (Washington's apotheosis, Lincoln's "temple") is the world that Mary of Guadalupe faced down in 1531: the Aztec murder machine was literally being torn down and its temples turned into the building of Mexico City (including the Cathedral) but it was replaced by the rapacious greed of Spanish magistrates who saw the Amerindians, newly freed of Aztec dominion as objects (not subjects) of Spanish dominion. The Marian apparition changed it all. Even if it was all made up, eye-witness accounts were fictional, the tilma itself an artifact not of the miraculous but of Jesuit deceit (they were Franciscans, moh-rons), those 8 million baptisms over the subsequent ten years remain. Something happened, and it can't be explained away.