Leticia Arrieta Gonzalez, a member of St. Thomas More Catholic Church, feels at peace inside the newly completed Shrine of Our Lady of San Juan de los Lagos.
“It’s like she’s that mother who is always waiting for you with open arms,” Gonzalez said in Spanish. “She’s always telling you to not be afraid. She’s here. She’s your mother. She’s your refuge.”
If you look closely, past the offerings of hair and trinkets and shoes left in exchange for miracles, you might be able to see all the red tape — and the patience of a saint — it took to get the shrine built.
Construction is subject to bureaucracy, no matter how holy the subject matter. The church needed to apply for permits, design variances and even had to ask a board of bishops for a status change.
The story of bureaucracy in a Tulsa church starts in Colonial Mexico, when the Franciscans, a Catholic religious order, left statutes of the Virgin Mary as a way to try and convert the Indigenous people, said Denny Rodriguez, a church spokesman. One of those statues was placed inside a church in San Juan de los Lagos, Mexico.
The statue was removed when a girl in a circus act fell from a trapeze onto a bed full of daggers and died, Rodriguez said. But she was brought back to life with the statue from the church after it was placed on her body, marking the first miracle attributed to Our Lady of San Juan de los Lagos, he said.
The devotion to Our Lady of San Juan de los Lagos kept growing after that day. The shrine in San Juan de los Lagos is the second most visited in Mexico behind the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico City.
A local family donated the replica of the statue to St. Thomas More Catholic Church during the pandemic.
“It made us understand that God hadn’t left us alone,” Rodriguez said in Spanish. “God was present through Mary.”
After the donation, St. Thomas More’s Pastor, Father José María Briones, decided to dedicate the chapel to Our Lady of San Juan de los Lagos. This started a long process to receive approval for the dedication from the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, an assembly of bishops across the country. The statue then found its home in the chapel.
In 2023, Briones decided he wanted to expand the area to fit more people, Rodriguez said. The church had to ask the Conference of Catholic Bishops for approval again to modify the chapel. This time around they had to receive approval from the City of Tulsa as well.
Remodeling for an expanded chapel began in October 2024. A few months later, Briones decided Our Lady of San Juan de los Lagos deserved to be a full shrine.
This created a new level of challenges for the church.
A church in pursuit of a shrine designation must offer different sacraments, including confession and mass, nearly every day.
Briones had to send a third letter to the senior bishop for approval to designate it as a shrine. They received approval from the Conference of Catholic Bishops for the designation and remodeling began.
“This has been a project that has had many challenges, many obstacles with city permits, sometimes people wouldn’t come to work or the weather. One thing or another, there was always something,” Rodriguez said.
The project was originally supposed to be completed in six months. Instead, it took roughly a year.
A senior bishop with the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops traveled to Tulsa in May to dedicate the portion of the church as an official shrine, though the project wasn’t yet complete.
It wasn’t until August that the statue was placed in its new home. The church held its first mass inside the shrine Sept. 8.
The shrine now has mass, confessions, baptisms, confirmations and more throughout any given week. It also provides an additional 350 seats to the church grounds.
“Although it’s done, there are still some minor details here and there, but thank God, we have church there every day,” Rodriguez said. “…It’s a place where, thanks to God, it’s bearing its fruits.”
The church expects more visitors from different places as there are only two shrines in Oklahoma — the one at St. Thomas More and a shrine dedicated to a replica of Our Lady of Guadalupe at St. Francis Xavier Catholic Church in Stillwater.
Many people from the Hispanic and Latino community cannot travel to the shrine in San Juan de los Lagos, Mexico given their immigration status, Rodriguez said.
“To have this place here signifies that the people who can’t visit the original in Mexico can come here to fulfill their promises,” he said.
Visitors can see the shrine at St. Thomas More Catholic Church at 2720 S. 129th E. Ave.
This article was produced as part of a partnership between the Tulsa Flyer and La Semana, a Tulsa-based bilingual Spanish-English newspaper serving Latino communities in Oklahoma.
News decisions at the Tulsa Flyer are made independently of our board members and financial supporters. Read more about our editorial independence policy here.
