A project that seeks to bring images of Our Lady of Guadalupe to every corner of the world has completed its latest challenge: covering the entire perimeter of Mexico. Source: CNA.
“The Virgin Everywhere” began during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 in Monterrey, Nuevo León state on the border with the US as a joint initiative by Alejandro Olivares and his friend, Juan García Gaeta.
“Everything ends where it begins. We are in Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua state, at St. Lawrence Church. We just finished Mass. We are giving thanks because we started here to place images of the Virgin on the border, and today we finished,” Mr Olivares said.
“There are already images from Tijuana to Matamoros [west to east on the northern border],” he said. “We travelled many kilometres to place the Virgin everywhere, and today we finished. But we didn’t just finish the border, we finished the entire perimeter of this great country.”
In the five years since the project started, “we’ve already reached 120 countries,” Mr Olivares said.
Among other countries far from Mexico, he noted, “there’s already one in Zambia, one in New Zealand, more than three in Australia, five in Iceland, etc.”
Outside of Mexico, he estimates there are “about a thousand” images of Our Lady of Guadalupe, out of a total of 52,000 they’ve produced over the past five years. The rest are “within Mexico.”
All the “The Virgin Everywhere” locations around the world can be seen on Google Maps.
In this challenge alone, covering the perimeter of Mexico with images of the Virgin, they used about 1700.
Since its inception, the project’s mechanics have remained the same: someone purchases an image through the website www.lavirgenentodoslados.com and takes it home. With that money, the team finds a suitable wall on a street and, with permission, stencils a similar image.
Mr Olivares said he’s seen the impact of taking the image of the Virgin “everywhere”.
People’s reactions are often “one of surprise, of gratitude … we’ve had many people cry with emotion,” he said. “Yes, it’s been something that no one expects, and they say, ‘You know what, you made my day.’”
FULL STORY
‘The Virgin Everywhere’ project lines Mexico’s borders with images of Our Lady of Guadalupe (By David Ramos, CNA)
“The Virgin Everywhere” project map (Google Maps)
