Am I not here, I who am your mother?

The entire relationship is address, and the founding story is one reply. According to the Nican Mopohua, written in Nahuatl, the Virgin appeared four times to Juan Diego, a Chichimec peasant, and once to his uncle Juan Bernardino, beginning on the morning of 9 December 1531. She spoke to him in his own language - Nahuatl, the language of the former Aztec empire - and identified herself as the mother of the very true deity. The sign he was sent to gather was Castile roses, not native to Mexico, blooming out of season on the summit of Tepeyac Hill; he carried them in his tilma, the cloak that bears the image venerated ever since. And the sentence the devotion is built on is her answer to his worry: '¿No estoy yo aquí que soy tu madre?' - 'Am I not here, I who am your mother?' - which the record calls the most famous phrase of the apparitions, and which is inscribed above the main entrance to the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe, on Tepeyac Hill in Mexico City, the most-visited Catholic shrine in the world and, the article says, the third most-visited sacred site. The shelf's test is address rather than watching, with the other end understood to hear, and that is the whole cult - built on one reply that nobody but a single man is recorded to have received. The evidence has been contested from the beginning. The 1556 inquiry records an attack on devotion to an image 'painted yesterday by the Indian Marcos'; Sahagún recorded his suspicion that it was 'a Satanic invention to cloak idolatry under the confusion of this name, Tonantzin' - 'They come from distant lands to this Tonantzin as in olden times'. Juan Diego himself is doubted: Zumárraga's own writings never mention him, the 1556 inquiry omits him, he appears in no document before the mid-17th century, and in 1996 the abbot of the Basilica was forced to resign after saying Juan Diego was 'a symbol, not a reality'. None of it stopped anything. In 1754 the Sacred Congregation of Rites confirmed the apparitions and the December 12 feast; Leo XIII granted the decree of canonical coronation in 1887, executed in 1895; and in 2002 Juan Diego was canonised as the first indigenous American saint. The image's own history is a record of being handled, defended and examined. In 1887-88 the ten-point crown painted on the Virgin's head disappeared - the change was noticed on 23 February 1888, and eventually a painter confessed on his deathbed that a clergyman had instructed him to remove it. In 1921 a bomb left under the tilma by an anti-Catholic secularist damaged the altar and left the image unharmed; the survival is called miraculous by devotees. In 1981, examining the cloth under infrared light, Philip Serna Callahan and Jody Brant Smith found no trace of sizing or sketching underneath the paint, and no explanation for the original parts of the image or their preservation. That is the honest shape of the whole entry: the most-visited shrine in the Catholic world rests on a Nahuatl text and a piece of cloth, and the address has been going up to both, undiminished, for five hundred years.