Mother’s Day on May 10 marked the final day of the Madre Peregrina tour in the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis. It began at the Cathedral of St. Paul in St. Paul on April 23 and ended at Incarnation in Minneapolis.
Wrapping up the tour on Mother’s Day was intentional, said Estela Villagrán Manancero, director of Latino Ministry for the archdiocese. Many Latinos have a deeply rooted devotion to the Blessed Mother, she explained, especially people from Mexico. She took full advantage of the opportunity to join in the celebration on the final day by bringing her own mother, Maria Lombardi, 92. The two, parishioners at St. Alphonsus in Brooklyn Center, arrived a half hour before the 1 p.m. Mass and stayed at the church until 4:30 p.m., well after the Mass ended.
“I helped her to touch the image,” Villagrán Manancero said. “She was just so emotional that she almost fainted.”
This experience for Lombardi goes back to her childhood and the death of her mother when she was 8 months old.
“She told me that the first time her father told her about the Virgin Mary, she said, ‘Oh, she’s going to adopt me, she’s going to be my mom,’” Villagrán Manancero said. “So, my mom grew up with this (belief) and taught me that Our Lady was her mom. … For the hour and a half we were there (standing at the statue for veneration), she just couldn’t stop crying.”
Many others had similar experiences, Villagrán Manancero said. She made multiple visits to both sites and received texts and emails from people who shared their experiences. Many tears were shed, she noted, and many prayer petitions were written on white ribbons placed up front near the statue at each location. Eventually, organizers ran out of ribbons and had to scramble to find more. Those ribbons will be taken to Mexico City at some point and brought the city’s cathedral.
Meanwhile, the tour will continue. The day after the finale at Incarnation, the statue traveled to Aurora, Illinois. Two women from Mexico City travel with the statue, which requires six hours to set up and 18 men to assemble and place it in a church sanctuary, Villagrán Manancero said. A total of 10,000 people visited the Madre Peregrina at Incarnation (2,000 on Mother’s Day) and nearly 1,000 at the Cathedral. About 8,000 rosaries were blessed and handed out at both churches. Organizers ran out of rosaries and had to scramble to find more, Villagrán Manancero said.
A second statue — which also is a three-dimensional, life-sized replica of the image of Our Lady of Guadalupe left on St. Juan Diego’s tilma in Mexico City — is on tour in other countries. The tours began in 2025 and will continue to 2031, which is the 500th anniversary of Mary’s apparition to St. Juan Diego.
Villagrán Manancero said the timing of the Madre Peregrina’s visit here in the archdiocese was good for the Latino community after more than two months of hardship connected to the federal immigration enforcement effort known as Operation Metro Surge, which took place during the winter months. Many Latinos were afraid to leave their homes, Villagrán Manancero said, and attendance at Spanish speaking Masses went down significantly.
Even during the statue tour, many Latinos feared leaving their homes to come to the two sites, so Villagrán Manancero arranged buses from their parishes to visit the Madre Peregrina. Every bus that came was full, she said.
“The people … felt really relaxed and at home there,” Villagrán Manancero said of the churches where the Madre Peregrina was brought. “It was a renewal; it was a healing.”
During Metro Surge, she said “we lost 80% of the (Latino) people at the parishes. It was just like another COVID (pandemic) for us. People were afraid to go to Mass.” Finally, on Easter Sunday, many Latinos returned for Mass, she said.
The feeling Latino people had about the tour was expressed in a quote she heard from Deacon Ramon Garcia Degollado, who was at the Mother’s Day Mass and works in Latino Ministry for the archdiocese.
“Deacon Ramon was saying, ‘When your mom is home, everything is fine,’” she said. She called the Madre Peregrina tour “this healing power that Mary brought to us.”
