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Mexican pilgrimage returns after covid
MEXICO CITY — Mexico’s largest religious pilgrimage for its Day of the Virgin of Guadalupe returned Monday without restrictions for the first time since the covid-19 pandemic. For two years, the multi-day pilgrimage had been canceled or curtailed because the massive numbers of faithful presented a risk of contagion.
During the darkest days of the pandemic in 2020, the Mexico City Basilica where the Virgin’s image is preserved was closed entirely for four days. It was open in 2021, but pilgrims coming from across the country were not allowed to maintain their tradition of sleeping outside it.
For this year’s Dec. 12 ceremony, the basilica’s patio was awash in a sea of tents and sleeping people.
People sleep at the basilica to show their devotion — one of the high points is a midnight Mass at which the traditional birthday song “Las Mananitas” is sung to the Virgin — but also because many pilgrims are poor.
Hundreds of thousands walk, ride bicycles or take buses on the pilgrimage. This year, the Mexico City government estimated a total of 11 million people visited the shrine over the last few days.
“Thanks to God, we have recovered normality,” the rector of the basilica, Monsignor Salvador Martinez, said in a statement inviting people to visit “if possible, avoiding large crowds.”
Such good intentions were impossible amid a human sea of believers.
The basilica holds an image of the Virgin that is said to have miraculously imprinted itself on a cloak belonging to the Indigenous peasant Juan Diego in 1531.