On December 9, 1531, the Virgin Mary appeared to Juan Diego, a poor Aztec convert, on the hill of Tepeyac outside Mexico City. She asked him to tell the bishop to build a church on the site. When Juan Diego brought the bishop a sign, he opened his cactus-fiber cloak, the tilma, to release roses. Imprinted on the cloak was the image of Our Lady of Guadalupe. In the 1950s, qualified Mexican ophthalmologists, including Dr. Rafael Torrija Lavoignet and Dr. Javier Torroella Bueno, examined the original tilma directly with ophthalmoscopes. They documented that the eyes of the Virgin exhibit the triple Purkinje-Sanson reflections that only a living human eye can produce, due to the curved surfaces of the cornea and the lens. Dr. Torrija Lavoignet described the eyes as appearing "strangely alive." In 1979, Dr. José Aste Tonsmann, a Cornell-trained engineer working in digital image processing at IBM, began studying high-resolution photographs of the Virgin's eyes. He magnified the pupils 2,500 times and identified 13 microscopic human figures reflected inside, including Juan Diego opening his tilma before Bishop Zumárraga, the translator Juan González, and an indigenous family group. The figures appear in both eyes in different proportions, exactly as they would in a living human eye. He presented his findings at the Pontifical Athenaeum Regina Apostolorum in Rome in 2001. The image on the tilma has no brushstrokes, no underdrawing, and no sealant. A biophysicist from the University of Florida, Dr. Philip Callahan, examined it with infrared photography in 1981 and concluded that the original portions could not be explained by any normal artistic technique of the period. The cactus fiber it is painted on should have rotted within 20 years. It has not deteriorated in almost 500 years. ✝️🇲🇽 #jesus #christianity #catholic - @sacredchad