The Guadalupe Institute

Did the Book of Revelation[1] prophesize the U.S. Constitution and Guadalupe?

The language of apocalyptic writing is richly symbolic, and the importance of the visions which are described is never in their immediate literal meaning.

According to St. John’s Gospel, in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us. Some 70 or so years after the Incarnation, St. John on the Roman prison island of Patmos wrote the Apocalypse. In Revelations 12:1-9, he mentions: “a great sign appeared in the sky, a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars. Miguel Sanchez, in his Imagen de La Virgen María Madre de Dios de Guadalupe (1648), used that description as a pencil sketch for his description of the image of Guadalupe. Without rancor or bias, he honored the Spanish by the Conquest, the Indigenous by the location Tepayac, and the Church by the biblical references. Nationalism was added by Miguel Hidalgo and others. The Guadalupe tradition is embedded in the history of the United States conquest of Mexico by the treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo.

Catherine Drinker Bowen’s Miracle at Philadelphia, Little Brown and Company, 1986, suggests this remarkable document was inspired. She describes an impasse during deliberations. A delegate suggested prayer. Agreement was reached. It was decided to keep prayer within the convention. From that moment forward, the delegates continued, and drafted the Constitution. Joseph J. Ellis’ American Creation, Alfred & Knopf 2007 stated “if you declared inadmissible any explanation for this creative moment that depended upon divine intervention, then what besides dumb luck can account for the achievement that was the American founding?” This unique document, along with the Declaration of Independence, with its statement that all men are created equal, and endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights among which are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness was drafted in the city of brotherly love, Philadelphia. St. John in the Apocalypse, Revelations 3.7, wrote letters to Angels in seven cities, one of which was Philadelphia.

Possible Conclusion: Both Guadalupe and Philadelphia, have a reference in the Book of Revelation or Apocalypse.

[1] The Greek title of this book is “Apocalypse of John”, and the word “apocalypse” is a transliteration of the Greek word for revelation: any writing under this title claims to include a revelation of hidden things, imparted by God, and particularly a revelation of events hidden in the future. It is not easy to draw an exact dividing line between prophecy and apocalypse, and the writers of apocalyptic are in some ways the successors of the prophets; but we can a t least make the distinction that the Old Testament prophets characteristically received the message by “hearing the word of God” and passed it on by word of mouth, whereas the author of a written apocalypse was given his revelation in a vision and passed it on in writing. (From Introduction to the Book of Revelation, the Jerusalem Bible, Doubleday and Company, Inc., 1966).