The Virgin Mary will accompany the Church in the New Evangelization, just as she did during the first preaching of the Gospel in the Americas, Los Angeles Archbishop Jose H. Gomez told around 100,000 devotees at the Aug. 5 Guadalupe Celebration.

“Our Lady of Guadalupe is calling us today, my brothers and sisters,” the archbishop said in his keynote address to one of the largest Catholic gatherings in U.S. history at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. “She is calling us to greater faith, to greater love, to greater hope.”

“Let’s ask Our Lady of Guadalupe – the bright star of the first evangelization and the Mother of the New Evangelization – to help us all to be better instruments of the love of God, so that everyone in our world may come to love him,” the archbishop told the coliseum crowd.

Sunday’s event, co-sponsored by the Knights of Columbus and the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, was one of the city’s largest Catholic celebrations in recent memory. It is the Knights' second such gathering, following the 2009 Guadalupe Festival in Arizona. On display at the celebration, for veneration by the faithful, was the only U.S.-based relic of the Tilma of Guadalupe – the saint's garment that was imprinted with a miraculous image of the Virgin.

Though that image has become an unmistakable part of Hispanic culture, its meaning transcends ethnic and geographical boundaries, as Archbishop Gomez stressed in his keynote address. “Our Lady of Guadalupe is not only the Mother of the people of Mexico,” the Los Angeles Church leader observed. “She is the Mother of all the peoples of the Americas! She is the New Eve. She is the Mother of all the living! My brothers and sisters, we are all children of Our Lady’s mission at Tepeyac! All of us! We are all Guadalupanos!”

As she appeared to St. Juan Diego, Mary announced herself as both “the mother of the true God” and “your compassionate Mother, yours and that of all the people that live together in this land, and also of all the other various lineages of men.” St. Juan Diego, an indigenous peasant and Catholic convert, “heard her voice and carried out the will of God,” Archbishop Gomez recalled. Nine million Mexicans are said to have become Catholic in the seven years that followed the apparition.

Bl. Maria Ines founded the Poor Clare Missionary Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament, sending women to proclaim the Gospel through consecrated life in 14 countries. She charged her sisters “to carry the image of Our Lady of Guadalupe, so that she – through her maternal tenderness – would bring her Divine Son to live in the hearts of those who hunger for God without knowing it.”