The post-synodal apostolic exhortation given at the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico City after the 1997 Special Assembly for America, which deliberately treated the continent as one America rather than two. Organised around the theme of encounter with the living Jesus Christ as the way to conversion, communion and solidarity, it reviews the lights and shadows of the Church in America, calls for a new evangelisation, and addresses the social realities of the hemisphere — poverty, foreign debt, corruption, the drug trade, migration and the rights of indigenous peoples — while proposing Our Lady of Guadalupe as patroness of all America.