The Archdiocese of Los Angeles joined Catholics worldwide on Monday in marking the start of a Jubilee Year honoring Our Lady of Guadalupe.
Pope Leo XIV granted the Guadalupan Jubilee Year to mark the 50th anniversary of the dedication of the current Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico City and the transfer of the image of the Virgin Mary to the shrine on Oct. 12, 1976, according to the archdiocese.
The observance also coincides with the 495th anniversary of the apparition of Our Lady of Guadalupe to St. Juan Diego, according to Catholic tradition.
“This is a great Jubilee,” Los Angeles Archbishop José H. Gomez said. “Now is the hour to live our faith with attentive hearts, with new seriousness and new joy; to go deeper in prayer and study, to grow in our knowledge and love for Jesus and His mother; and to embrace more fully our responsibility to spread the faith and bring others to Jesus. Now is also the hour for a new commitment to the continental mission, to the evangelization of the Americas, beginning in our own country.”
The archdiocese announced Monday that its 2027 pilgrimage to Mexico City in honor of Our Lady of Guadalupe will take place during the first weekend of July.
Gomez will celebrate two Masses of Thanksgiving during the pilgrimage, the first on Friday, July 2, at the Metropolitan Cathedral of Mexico City, and the second at noon Saturday, July 3, at the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe.
The Archdiocese of Los Angeles is home to what church officials describe as the only known relic in the United States of the tilma, or cloak, of St. Juan Diego, on which Catholics believe the image of Our Lady of Guadalupe appeared in 1531.
The relic, a small piece of the cloak, is enshrined at the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels in downtown Los Angeles and is available for daily veneration.
During the Jubilee Year, Catholics who visit the basilica in Mexico City with devotion and a contrite spirit and participate in a liturgical celebration or spend time in prayer may receive a plenary indulgence, according to the archdiocese.
The Catholic Church also requires sacramental confession, Communion, recitation of the Creed and prayer for the intentions of the pope to receive the indulgence, which church teaching describes as the remission of temporal punishment for sins already forgiven.
More than 300 people from across the Los Angeles Archdiocese joined Gomez for a Mass at the basilica during the 2026 pilgrimage. Gomez presented 45,000 prayer intentions submitted by Catholics throughout the archdiocese, many collected during a 2025 pilgrimage of images of Our Lady of Guadalupe and St. Juan Diego.
This year’s pilgrimage of the images is underway, with planned visits to 70 parishes and three Catholic cemeteries across the archdiocese, including locations in Los Angeles, Santa Barbara and Ventura counties.
The visits are intended to collect prayer petitions and prepare Catholics for the 95th annual procession and Mass honoring Our Lady of Guadalupe, scheduled for Sunday, Dec. 6.
The annual procession, which the archdiocese describes as the oldest religious procession in Los Angeles, was established in 1931 by Mexican Catholics who fled persecution by the Mexican government during the Cristero War.
Additional information and the pilgrimage schedule are available at lacatholics.org/guadalupe.