.- Our Lady of Guadalupe is the true Lady of the Amazon, a leading expert on the apparition said, pointing to Pope John Paul II’s recognition of Our Lady of Guadalupe as Queen of all the Americas.

Fr. Eduardo Chávez is the director of the Major Institute of Guadalupan Studies and the postulator for the cause for the canonization of Saint Juan Diego. He told ACI Prensa, CNA's Spanish language sister agency, that Our Lady of Guadalupe “takes nothing from syncretism, what she does is a perfect inculturation, as Saint John Paul II says” in his 1999 apostolic exhortation Ecclesia in America.

In the Guadalupe Basilica on January 23, 1999, by placing Ecclesia in America at the feet of the Virgin, he said, Saint John Paul II underscored that Our Lady of Guadalupe is “Mother and Queen of this Continent” and took the title used years prior in the Synod for America: “Patroness of all the Americas and Star of the First and New Evangelization.”

On that day, Saint John Paul II said that Our Lady of Guadalupe knows “the paths followed by the first evangelizers of the New World, from Guanahani Island and Hispaniola to the jungles of Amazonia and Andean peaks, reaching Tierra del Fuego in the South and the Great Lakes and mountains of the North.”

Chávez emphasized that for almost 500 years, the Virgin of Guadalupe has been “perfectly well known as the patroness of the entire American Continent.”

“She brings Jesus Christ Our Lord,” the priest said. “She brings the truth which is Jesus Christ, and puts it in the heart of every human being, over and above cultures, traditions and languages.”

This article was originally published by our sister agency, ACI Prensa. It has been translated and adapted by CNA.