Our Lady of Chiquinquirá, patroness of Colombia

“Behold, I am doing a new thing; now it springs up; shall you not perceive it?” (Isaiah 43:19), isn’t this the proclamation: “Behold, I am making all things new”?

I. Behold, I am making all things new: The prophetic theology of divine renewal

Chapter 43 of Isaiah is one of the most profound passages in the Old Testament prophetic literature. Second Isaiah, writing to the people in Babylonian exile, proclaims that the Exodus is not merely a memory of the past but a promise for the future. “Do not remember the former things, or consider the things of old. Behold, I am doing a new thing; now it springs up; shall you not perceive it? I will make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert” (Isaiah 43:18-19). The theology behind this promise is pivotal: God does not only act in the past history of sacred scripture, but He acts presently, and His action always produces something new. This novelty is not destruction of the old; it is restoration, renewal, the old appearing with renewed vigor when divine grace touches it. It is precisely within this theological category of renewal that a remarkable historical event took place at the Colombian sanctuary of Chiquinquirá in 1586, when a faded and nearly invisible Marian painting miraculously appeared vibrant before the eyes of an astonished indigenous woman.

II. Chiquinquirá, 1586: The miraculous renewal of the faded painting

In the mid-16th century, Spanish painter Alonso de Narváez, settled in the newly founded city of Tunja, in present-day Boyacá department, Colombia, painted a canvas on indigenous cotton for a rural chapel owned by encomender Antonio de Santana. The painting depicted Our Lady of the Rosary with the Child Jesus in her arms, flanked by Saint Anthony of Padua to her right and Saint Andrew the Apostle to her left. However, the quality of the painting was modest, and the pigments did not withstand time well. Within a few years, the canvas began to fade, colors faded, figures became nearly invisible. The painting ended up abandoned in a small adobe barn in the town of Chiquinquirá, used as an improvised chapel for the indigenous and mestizo people of the region. On December 26, 1586, indigenous woman Maria Ramos, known for her piety, was praying in the chapel when she witnessed the old painting gradually light up. She called others present, and before multiple witnesses, the painting regained its original colors in a matter of minutes, even more vivid than initially, with restored outlines of the three figures and shine on their garments. The event became known as “La Renovación,” the Renewal. Devotion quickly spread throughout the vice-regency of New Granada and later throughout Colombia. Pope Pius X declared Our Lady of Chiquinquirá the Patroness of Colombia in 1910, and Pope Benedict XV authorized her canonical coronation in 1919. Pope John Paul II visited Chiquinquirá in 1986, marking the fourth centenary of the Renewal.

## III. The Magnificat: The Song of Divine Renewal in HistoryThe Gospel of Luke accompanying this celebration is the Magnificat, the song Mary sang in Elizabeth’s house, and it is, in a proper sense, the first Marian theology formulated by the Mother herself. “My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit exults in God my Savior, for he has looked upon the humble state of his servant” (Lk 1:46-48). Following this comes the part of the song that describes God’s renewing action in history: “He has shown might with his arm; he has scattered the proud in their conceits. He has brought down the mighty from their thrones, and exalted those of humble rank” (Lk 1:51-53). This song is not a sequence of abstract ideas: it is a confession that God acts by renewing, reversing, restoring. And Marian theology from Chiquinquirá is a historical confirmation of this Magnificat program. The faded painting, abandoned in an adobe barn, was chosen by God as a visible sign of his renewing action. It was not a famous work of art from a European cathedral that was selected; it was a humble painting from a peripheral vice-regency, and it was before the eyes of an indigenous person, not a bishop or a king, that renewal manifested itself. The logic of Chiquinquirá is the logic of the Magnificat incarnate in Colombian soil.## IV. Chiquinquirá and Marian Theology of Renewal as Mary’s Constant SignatureThe miraculous renewal of the image of Chiquinquirá is not, in the universal history of Mary, an isolated case. Several other Marian images throughout history have experienced similar phenomena of unexplained restoration, auto-illumination, sudden vivification. This recurrence suggests a theological intuition that universal Marian theology has reflected in various forms: Mary’s presence in history has as a permanent characteristic the renewal. Where Mary enters, something renews. The grace she mediated at the Incarnation is a radical novelty, and her perpetual maternal ministry continues to operate this novelty in places and people who welcome her. Vatican Council II recognized that Mary “holds in the Church after Christ the most exalted and at the same time the closest place among us” (Lumen Gentium, 54), and this nearness becomes a permanent source of renewal for the pilgrim Church. Chiquinquirá is, in this sense, the Colombian version of a universal promise: where Mary is, faded colors regain brightness, lost contours become clear again when she is invoked, and what seemed forgotten by time is preserved by the loving memory of the Mother. The Patroness of Colombia taught her people four and a half centuries ago a lesson that remains timely: nothing is definitively lost as long as there is a Mother who remembers.