Today is the Feast of our Lady of Guadalupe. In all the authenticated Marian apparitions, our Lady always chose to show herself to poor and simple people like Juan Diego, on Tepeyac Hill and asking them to deliver her messages. Today, the sight of her apparitions are among the top tourist/pilgrimage destinations in the world, often with opulent and magnificent churches and other structures. The poor and simple original visionaries could not have imagined nor expected what these places have become.
It is a far cry from how the world would have done it. The world would work through the rich and powerful, probably call for a press conference to launch a great campaign or an ambitious project. God works through poor and simple folks to serve as his emissaries or as they are properly called – prophets. These folks are usually not believed and even scoffed at. In the case of our Lady’s apparitions, the most difficult to convince and often the last to believe are Church authorities themselves. The most skeptical of the Resurrection were – you guessed it right! – the Church authorities of those times, the Sanhedrin.
Oh how God confounds the wisdom of the world with His folly for He often speaks through the poor to proclaim His Word. Thus, the song of Mary reverberates through the ages:
He has scattered the proud in their conceit.
He has cast down the mighty from their thrones,
and has lifted up the humble.
He has filled the hungry with good things,
and the rich he has sent away empty.