“Mondays with Mary” – Our Lady of Guadalupe and the Conquest of Darkness

By Tom Perna on December 10, 2012 • ( 1 Comment )

Since yesterday was the feast day of Saint Juan Diego and Wednesday is the feast day for Our Lady of Guadalupe, I thought I would write about this fantastic book that my friends Michael and Laura shared with me some months ago. The title of the book is – Our Lady of Guadalupe and the Conquest of the Darkness. The link will bring you to a website where you can purchase it. If you don’t purchase it, you will regret it. This book is SOOOO good! Once I began to read it, it was not put down (well okay it was, but I read it quickly).

It is an objective account based on historical records written by Dr. Warren H. Carroll. If you are not aware of whom he is, check out the link above. For those of you that live in the United States, he is the founder of Christendom College in Front Royal, Virginia. Where many texts about the Physical Conquest of Mexico and the person of Hernan Cortes are often politically driven or written to change the course of history, Dr. Carroll writes a superb book without a hidden agenda. It’s simply a great book that will grab your attention from the first few paragraphs. Read it! You won’t regret it.

Many people know the story of how Our Blessed Mother appeared as a Aztec (Mexican) woman to Saint Juan Diego, but so many don’t know about the years leading up to the visions on Tepeyac Hill. Many don’t know about the horrific sacrifices the Aztecs performed to their demonic gods. This book gives a detailed account of the events that happen from 1487-1548. It not only explains the physical Conquest of Mexico, but more importantly, the spiritual Conquest of Mexico, which is often never told in history books written by secular scholars.

Instead of going into my own detailed account of the book, I am going to leave you with some teasers from the book in the hopes that you will purchase the book and read it for yourself. You will not regret it. It’s a fantastic read and one that will more than likely be read again.

“His name was Cuauhtlatohuac, “he who talks like an eagle.” (An eagle perched on a cactus growing out of a rock, with a snack in its beak, was the symbol of Aztec Tenochtitlan, Cactus Rock.) Approximately forty years later, Cuauhtlatohuac was to be baptized with the Christian name of Juan Diego; and it was to him that the Mother of God, who crushes the Serpent, was to appear on the nearby hill of Tepeyac as Our Lady of Guadalupe.”

“When they were ready to go inland, Martin of Valencia and his eleven Franciscan apostles set out on the 200-mile journey to Mexico City, across the mountains and deserts, in thin brown robes, barefoot. For the next two hundred and fifty years, every Franciscan missionary entering Mexico for the first time walked the 200 miles from Veracruz to Mexico City barefoot. It was done when Fray Junipero Serra, the apostle of California, arrived in the eighteenth century.”

“As the people of England went out of the Church Christ founded, the people of Mexico came into it. The consequences to the Church of the loss of England reverberate down the centuries; she has suffered few greater losses in the whole of the Christian era. The consequences to the Church of the conversion of the majority of the population of the New World who live south of the United States still lie mostly in the future. But no part of the world is more Catholic, and few equally so –and that is, above all, the gift of the Virgin of Guadalupe.”

Two other books on Our Lady of Guadalupe worth reading: