catholic-devotion des-plaines guadalupe-shrine-usa illinois marian-devotion our-lady-of-guadalupe pilgrimage shrine

The Rise and Evolution of the Shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Des Plaines, Illinois

Nov 01, 2023

A Statue That Traveled

In 1987, a man named Joaquín Martínez made a pilgrimage to Mexico and returned to Chicago carrying a statue of Our Lady of Guadalupe. It was a simple act of devotion, the kind that has always sustained the faith of ordinary Catholics. He wanted to share what he had brought back. The statue began traveling from parish to parish across the city, welcomed wherever it went.

No one, at that moment, was planning a shrine.

The Blessing at Lake Opeka

The following June, during the Marian Year proclaimed by Pope Saint John Paul II, the statue was blessed by Father Robert Harne at an open-air Mass in Lake Opeka Park in Des Plaines. The occasion drew the kind of gathering that devotion to Our Lady of Guadalupe tends to produce: people who had carried her in their hearts across borders and were glad to find a place to honor her together.

By 1988, the statue had found a permanent home at Maryville Academy, under the care of Father John P. Smyth. The pilgrimage had ended. The work of building a place of prayer was about to begin.

El Cerrito: A Hill in Illinois

On December 12, 1995, an outdoor shrine took shape on the grounds of what would eventually become the Shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe. Those who built it named it El Cerrito, the little hill, an intentional echo of the Cerro del Tepeyac in Mexico City, where Our Lady had appeared to Juan Diego in 1531. The name was not sentiment; it was theology. Every shrine dedicated to Our Lady of Guadalupe participates, in some way, in the grace of Tepeyac.

The following year, a digitally reproduced replica of the original image of Our Lady of Guadalupe was installed at El Cerrito. It was the first such reproduction to travel internationally from the Basilica in Mexico City, a gesture of connection between the source of the devotion and one of its newest expressions.

Soil from Tepeyac

In June 1997, Monsignor Esteban Martínez arrived from Mexico with the Basilica Choir, and the site was formally named Cerrito del Tepeyac de Chicago. During the ceremony, soil from the original Cerro del Tepeyac in Mexico City was mixed with the soil of the Illinois site. It was a symbolic act, but symbols in the Catholic tradition are never merely symbolic. The mixing of that soil declared what the faithful already believed: this place belongs to the same devotion, the same Mother, the same story.

Sculpture and Artistic Expression

In 2001, a replica of the sculpture known as The Offering, created by AGD Mendoza and weighing more than two tons, was installed at the shrine as a gift from the Basilica of Mexico. In 2008, The Apostle's Cross was added, a work inspired by the visions of the Mexican mystic Concepción Cabrera de Armida. These additions were not decoration. They were acts of devotion given permanent form, the faithful's instinct to honor what they love by making something beautiful in its presence.

A Shrine Recognized

In 2008, Father Miguel Martínez Figueroa was appointed the first Director of the shrine, bringing more stable pastoral leadership to what had grown from an informal devotional site into a significant Catholic destination. In 2013, Cardinal Francis George formally rechristened Cerrito del Tepeyac as the Shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe, and Father Marco Mercado became its first Rector.

By that same year, the shrine had been recognized as the second-most-visited shrine dedicated to Our Lady of Guadalupe in the world, after the Basilica in Mexico City. Millions of people had made the journey to Des Plaines, to a hill in Illinois that had been given the name of the hill in Mexico where heaven had come to earth.

The Chapel of Saint Joseph and Continuing Growth

In 2017, under Father Esequiel Sanchez and the Shrine's Council Members, construction began on the Chapel of Saint Joseph, continuing the site's development, which has never stopped growing since a man walked home from Mexico with a statue in his arms.

The Shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Des Plaines stands today as a reminder that devotion, when it is real, does not stay contained. It travels. It takes root. It builds things. What Joaquín Martínez brought back from Mexico in 1987 became a place of pilgrimage for millions, because the Mother he honored had already promised to make her home wherever her children sought her.

For more information or to plan a visit: solg.org Shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe, 1170 N River Rd, Des Plaines, IL 60016

For parishes and chapels that wish to bring the sacred image of Our Lady of Guadalupe into their own communities, we carry certified replicas produced by the artisan workshop that supplies the Basilica itself, bearing the official seals of the Basílica de Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe pressed directly into the work.

View Certified Basilica Art of Our Lady of Guadalupe

Our Lady of Guadalupe: A Complete Devotional Guide

Shop Our Lady of Guadalupe devotional jewelry

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