In preparation for Sunday’s celebration of the feast of the Virgin of Guadalupe, students at St. Patrick Catholic School constructed a large mosaic of the saint, with each student hand coloring one of the tiles.
The mosaic was unveiled in an all-school assembly Friday morning, with 76 students attending with their classroom teachers and principal.
The shrine of the Virgin of Guadalupe in Mexico City is the most visited Catholic pilgrimage destination in the world. Over the Friday and Saturday of Dec. 11-12, 2009, a record 6.1 million pilgrims visited the Basilica of Guadalupe to commemorate the anniversary of the apparition.
Cultural historians say Our Lady of Guadalupe became the recognized symbol of Catholic Mexicans by the mid-1500s and has served since as the most powerful unifying image of Mexican national history and culture. Many Perry residents have cultural and ancestral roots in Mexico.
In the view of some historians, Guadalupe continues to unify the mixture of cultures that blended to form Mexico, both racially and religiously. She has been called the first mestiza and the first Mexican, symbolically “bringing together people of distinct cultural heritages, while at the same time affirming their distinctness,” according to anthropologist Mary O’Connor.
According to the Wikipedia article on Our Lady of Guadalupe, the Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes once said that “you cannot truly be considered a Mexican unless you believe in the Virgin of Guadalupe,” and Nobel Literature laureate Octavio Paz said that “the Mexican people, after more than two centuries of experiments, have faith only in the Virgin of Guadalupe and the National Lottery.”
This year’s feast day will be celebrated at St. Pat’s with a Mañanitas ceremony at 5:30 a.m. followed by a Mass at 10:30 a.m., including a procession with the saint and a Mariachi band. 
