In 2023, my best friend was pregnant with her sixth child. It was a cesarean scar pregnancy, which for doctors is quite obvious: “Of course you’ll terminate right? Your uterus may blow any minute and you’ll orphan five kids. Think about it.”
Such news was a heavy cross for a devout Catholic family with amazing children who needed a mother and were overjoyed that another sibling was on its way.
My friends, however, didn’t think twice. Their instant answer and whisper of the Spirit was: “But we’re not going to be able to live with carrying such a decision.” And then came their own “fiat” — “May it be done to me according to your word.”
In Poland, we have an iconic image of Mary — Our Lady of Czestochowa. You entrust her with your sorrows, pains and struggles. Our Lady of Guadalupe is not as popular here as she is across the Americas, but someone in that moment of trial told my friend about her — and about the fact that Our Lady is pregnant in that iconic tilma. “Entrust it to her,” they said.
“Guadalupe just kind of attacked me at that moment, so to speak,” my friend recounted. “A mom from our school gave me her own medal with La Guadalupana, a stranger out of the blue handed an album about her to my husband and a religious sister we know from Instagram at that very time was on a pilgrimage at the Our Lady of Guadalupe shrine in Mexico.”
But no stores had an image in Poland, so I told my friend I have someone in the U.S. who can paint it. I asked my other friend’s sister, Mary, whether she’d be able to paint the image quickly — that family needed that icon as a visible sign of a protective mantle over my friend’s belly and heart. An image to pray to and kneel in front of.
Mary sketched the famed image in a day. The artist is from a family of 14. When I asked for the image, I wasn’t sure, so I asked: “By the way, Mary, which ‘number’ in the family are you? ‘I’m number six,'” she said.
The sixth baby in the Polish family — a girl — was born with a dozen doctors in the operating room, ready to save the life of the mother and child if needed.
That baby girl is almost three today, the joy of the family, the crazy youngest one singing around the house like a little Angel, which is, in fact, her name in Polish. Her mom is a happy, beautiful and healthy woman, strong as steel.
Our Lady of Guadalupe is credited for the miracle of saving them both.
My friend had to take the medal she was wearing throughout her pregnancy away from her neck for the complicated and hours-long operation. When they both survived, she passed it on to someone who was also in a precarious situation at that time.
“We need to take our Angel to Mexico one day” to meet the Virgin Mother who protected her, my friend said.
“If not for that image painted by Mary on my wall, I would think it was all a dream.”
Paulina Guzik is international editor for OSV News. Follow her on X @Guzik_Paulina.
