Catholics to Honor Our Lady of Guadalupe With Procession Sunday

A short pilgrimage through the downtown area honoring the Catholic and Latino icon Our Lady of Guadalupe will begin at 5 a.m. Sunday at the corner of 4th and French streets.

Hundreds of people are expected to walk with an image of Our Lady of Guadalupe, singing traditional mananitas, or “morning” songs, to celebrate one of the most important figures in modern Catholicism.

Bishop Jaime Soto of the Diocese of Orange said Our Lady of Guadalupe is an appropriate symbol of the ethnic diversity of Catholics in the area.

“She’s a great symbol of mixed cultures coming together in one,” Soto said. “Both the Spanish and indigenous cultures come together in that symbol in a dramatic way.”

Our Lady of Guadalupe is said to have appeared 460 years ago in Mexico as an Indian woman wearing the garb of Aztec royalty.

Her image was said to appear miraculously on a cloak, which now hangs in a church in Mexico City.

The procession Sunday will follow a replica of that image on loan to Orange County from the Archdiocese of Los Angeles.

“My hope is in the coming weeks [the image] will be visiting different churches in the diocese and that she can reach out to the Latinos in the community and other ethnicities in the County of Orange,” Soto said.

Alex Katz can be reached at (714) 966-5977.