Huge Celebration Honoring Our Lady of Guadalupe Set for L.A. Coliseum in August

The Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum will play host to a massive “Guadalupe Celebration” in August of 2012.

Source: Dateline Zero

The event will feature prayer, music, and speakers honoring Our Lady of Guadalupe, the Patroness of the Americas. It’s been scheduled for August 5 of next year; and is being organized by the Knights of Columbus.

The Celebration will bring together tens of thousands of Catholics from across the ethnically diverse five-million member archdiocese, as well as faithful from other areas of Southern California and beyond.

Information can be found at the Guadalupe Celebration website:www.guadalupecelebration.com.

From PRNewswire-USNewswire:

“We are pleased to be able to cosponsor this event with the Archdiocese of Los Angeles,” said Carl Anderson, Supreme Knight of the Knights of Columbus. “We strongly believe that Our Lady of Guadalupe has an important message to share with all of us and has an important role to play in unifying the faithful of this hemisphere. The ‘Guadalupe Celebration’ will be an opportunity for us to bring Our Lady’s message to a large audience joined together in prayer and celebrating the great gift she has given this hemisphere.”

Anderson in 2009 coauthored the New York Times bestseller Our Lady of Guadalupe: Mother of the Civilization of Love, with Msgr. Eduardo Chavez, who oversaw the Cause for Canonization of St. Juan Diego. Archbishop Gomez, Supreme Knight Anderson and Msgr. Chavez will all be featured speakers at the event in August.

Both the Archdiocese of Los Angeles and the Knights of Columbus have a history tied to Our Lady of Guadalupe.

Our Lady of Guadalupe appeared to St. Juan Diego – a Native American living in Mexico – in 1531. She left her image, miraculously on his cloak, or tilma. Today, the tilma is enshrined in Mexico City’s basilica, which stands on the site of the Blessed Mother’s apparition. It is the most visited shrine in the Western Hemisphere.

Los Angeles’ Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels is home to the only relic of St. Juan Diego’s tilma in the United States. The archdiocese has also been home to several large-scale Marian events in the past, including 2007′s Rosary Bowl in Pasadena, which drew more than 40,000, and the annual archdiocesan procession and Mass in honor of Our Lady of Guadalupe in East Los Angeles, which typically draws 25,000.

The Knights of Columbus’ devotion to Our Lady of Guadalupe reached a milestone with the chartering of their first Mexican council as the “Guadalupe Council” in Mexico City in 1905. Since then, the Knights have done much to spread Our Lady’s message, including co-sponsoring a U.S. tour of the Archdiocese’s tilma relic in 2003. The Knights also held their first-ever International Marian Congress on the Feast Day of Our Lady of Guadalupe in 2009, which concluded with the 22,000-person Guadalupe Festival in Phoenix, Ariz.

The Archdiocese of Los Angeles is the largest Catholic archdiocese in the United States with more than 5 million Catholics. The diocese was established in 1840, and was created an archdiocese in 1936. Archbishop Jose Horacio Gomez is the fifth Archbishop of Los Angeles. There are a total of 287 parishes located in 120 cities throughout the archdiocese.

The Knights of Columbus is the world’s largest Catholic fraternal organization. Last year, Knights donated nearly $155 million and more than 70 million hours of service to charitable causes around the world. Founded in 1882 by Venerable Father Michael McGivney in New Haven, Conn., the Knights of Columbus has grown to over 1.8 million members and 14,000 councils in more than a dozen countries worldwide.