The Marian triptych of Mexico City is completed by the Shrine of Our Lady of the Angels, now less frequented, but with an important history and tradition.
The Virgin of the Angels is rigorously the Madonna of the poor of Mexico and in this capacity her worship is less universal than that of the other, which can be called national ”, as Ignacio M. Altamirano thinks in landscapes and legends; but as is well known, the poor man when he celebrates the house made through the window and so we have that apart from August 2 and for nine days "The lights of the Angels" were celebrated, where fireworks and sparklers lit up multicolored the sky, then limpid, of Mexico City. The party was one of the busiest in the capital and where the public felt more at ease. However, the excesses and abundance of pulque, with its consequences, were limiting such copious parties.
The history goes back to 1580 when in one of those great floods suffered in the city as a result of the hydrostatic imbalance with the rupture and construction of new albarradones between the troubled waters, an oil painting of the Virgin Mary arrived at this site. The image came between the muddy waters and was rescued by a noble indigenous chief named Tzayoque who built it a chapel with an adobe wall and, given its deterioration, had it repainted on the wall.
The Virgin is beautiful and pious and has a luminous halo behind her. She is standing on the moon and the Holy Spirit holds her crown. An angelic choir and a multitude of cherubs surround her for what was called Our Lady of the Angels. In her attire and anatomical position there is a great resemblance to the Guadalupana, but this one is whiter and with more Spanish features.
This original image is the one that has been venerated on a fragile adobe wall since the 16th century, subject to floods, bad weather and revolutionary barbarisms, it was preserved intact and with its original coloring.
In 1808 the current church was built whose façade, although made of good ashlar masonry, is of absolute architectural poverty. Not so the interior, which is one of the most beautiful plants of this neoclassical of ours, which in Europe would be baroque. The dome is of magnificent proportions with skylights framing oculi. The internal resembles a crown.
This church (undoubtedly the nave) has been attributed to Manuel Tolsá. Pope Pius the Seventh granted him the privileges reserved to the great basilicas in 1811 when a deacon of the secular clergy José Guadalupe Rivas, guardian of this temple, entered the company of Jesus and the Jesuits settled in it.
