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CHICAGO — Renowned for its reverence for ancient tradition, the Byzantine Catholic Church is rather unhurried to add new feasts to its liturgical calendar.
However, in the past 20 years, the Byzantine Ruthenian Catholic Metropolia in the United States has added at least four new feast days, namely for three 20th-century martyred bishops — Blesseds Paul Gojdich, July 17, Basil Hopko, July 23, and Theodore Romzha, Oct. 31 — and one feast dedicated to the Mother of God, Our Lady of Guadalupe, Dec. 12.
While Our Lady of Guadalupe has been on the Byzantine Catholic calendar since 1999, many Byzantine Catholics still are unaware that this feast, largely perceived as a devotion of Latin-American Roman Catholics, also is theirs to celebrate.
This feast recalls the Blessed Virgin Mary’s apparition in Mexico in 1531, to a Mexican peasant, St. Juan Diego, and the subsequent miraculous manifestation of her image on St. Juan Diego’s tilma, or cloak, now enshrined in the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico City.
St. Mary Parish in Whiting, Indiana, has taken the lead in the Eparchy of Parma in promoting this Marian devotion. The parish commissioned a mural of Our Lady of Guadalupe last year.
The story that led to the feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe being added the Byzantine Catholic calendar is one of an American archbishop’s awakening to the need for the Byzantine Catholic Church to be engaged in the evangelizing mission of the church in North America.
During a pastoral visit to Mexico in January 1999, St. John Paul II named Our Lady of Guadalupe as the patroness of the Americas, declaring Dec. 12 as a solemn feast in her honor for the Catholic Church in the Americas. Also, in this context, St. John Paul II declared her the patroness of the New Evangelization, calling the church in the Americas to a deeper commitment to proclaiming the Gospel and to the conversion of non-believers.
Archbishop Judson Procyk of Pittsburgh, then head of the Byzantine Catholic Church in the United States, traveled to Mexico for the pope’s visit and attended the papal Mass at the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe.
One of the archbishop’s theological advisors later recounted that, upon Archbishop Procyk’s return from Mexico, he excitedly remarked, “The Guadalupana is ours.”
He added her feast day, Dec. 12, to the Byzantine Catholic calendar by circulating the related decree sent to all the bishops from the Congregation for Divine Worship.
Archbishop Procyk reportedly encountered something strangely familiar in Mexico City in the image on the tilma: In the Mother of Americas, he found the Mother of all Byzantine Catholics.
The Mother of God’s apparition to St. Juan Diego has much in common with the Byzantine tradition, where a miraculous icon comes to the lowly. In this regard, the Icon Not Made By Human Hands or the Mandylion of Edessa and the icon of Our Lady of Mariapoch come to mind.
As well, in Guadalupe, the Mother of God appeared as being with child, represented by her belt worn high on her abdomen. It is the only recognized Marian apparition in which she is pregnant — a detail that is particularly significant in the Byzantine tradition, which emphasizes the Blessed Virgin Mary’s maternity as “Theotokos,” a term which means “she who bore God.”
As devotions go hand-in-hand with liturgical expression in the Christian East, Father Maximos Davies of Holy Resurrection Monastery in St. Nazianz, Wisconsin, wrote a Byzantine Catholic office for Our Lady of Guadalupe, which draws heavily on Byzantine tradition to cast a new light on the miracle of Guadalupe.
For instance, one of the aposticha hymns for the feast takes up the traditional Vespers reading for the Mother of God, Proverbs 9: 1-11, depicting Mary as Lady Wisdom, calling all people to feast on her Son at the eucharistic liturgy.
At the same time, the office honors the particular message of hope that the Mother of God conveys specifically to the people of the Americas: “Know all my smallest and most humble children/that I am the Virgin who gave birth to God/The Word through whom everything has the breath of life!/He has given you to me as your Mother/ All you peoples of the Americas;/I will hear all your weeping and your complaints;/I will heal all your sorrows, hardships and sufferings./Repent and believe in the Gospel!/And together we will worship the Lord and lover of mankind!” (Doxasticon at Psalm 140).
The Office of Our Lady of Guadalupe strikes a balance between the temporal and spiritual hunger of the people of the Americas, recognizing that, as Our Lady exclaims elsewhere in the office, “The things that afflict you are nothing! For I have given birth to the conqueror of Hades, The Lord who removes the sting of death!”
As Byzantine Catholics in North America, who have adopted this feast and appropriated this devotion in our common life of prayer, we must contemplate a very timely question: How does this miraculous icon of Our Lady of Guadalupe call us to engage in the New Evangelization on this continent?
As full members of the Catholic Church in North America — one of the adopted lands of our ancestors and founders in the faith — we should encourage the observance of this feast in our parishes and missions, if we will truly bloom where we have been planted as a church.
By nourishing ourselves spiritually on Guadalupe’s message, our communities can become icons that can welcome all people to the fullness of the truth in the Byzantine Catholic Church in the Americas.
Caption: This icon of Our Lady of Guadalupe is in St. Mary Parish in Whiting, Indiana. It is the first parish in the Eparchy of Parma to commission an icon of Our Lady of Guadalupe. It was painted last year by iconographer Christine Uveges. (Photo: Laura Ieraci)
As published in Horizons, Dec. 3, 2017.
