"Brazil was born in the arms of the Holy Virgin"

As John Paul II said on the centenary of the coronation of Our Lady of Aparecida in 2004, Brazil is the largest Catholic country in the world.

Pope St. Pius X solemnly crowned the Virgin Mary as "Queen of Brazil" in 1904. But the history of the Marian devotion in Brazil dates back to the beginning of the 16th century, when the fleet of the Portuguese admiral Pedro Alvarez Cabral (1467 - 1520) landed, in April 1500, on the coast of a still unknown land that was first named "Island of Vera Cruz", before giving it its current name, "Brazil" (from the word "pau-brasil" or "wood in embers" evoking the color of the trunks of trees on fire).

After placing itself under the maternal protection of Mary and attending mass in a chapel dedicated to Our Lady of Bethlehem, the Portuguese fleet, commanded by Pedro Alvarez Cabral, set out in the early 1500s to discover distant lands beyond the Atlantic. And it was the Virgin Mary, under the name of Our Lady of Hope, who was the first to set foot on Brazilian soil, thanks to Pedro Alvares Cabral, who had the first mass celebrated in this new land in the presence of the statue of the Virgin Mary he had brought with him. This is why Brazilians like to say that "Brazil was born in the arms of Mary".

In fact, all the villages and ports of this new country began with the construction of a small church dedicated, most of the time, to Mary, and the entire Brazilian coastline is dedicated to the Virgin! The first known large Marian shrine erected in Brazil was that of Our Lady of Graces, in Bahia (or Baia), following an apparition of Mary to a young Indian girl married to a Portuguese man, in the 1530s.

In Itanhaen (near São Paulo), is the shrine of Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception, probably the first dedicated to Mary under this name in the region. But the greatest witness in Brazil of the devotion to Mary, in her Immaculate Conception, remains the shrine of the Immaculate Virgin in Aparecida, in the state of São Paulo. It was there, before the Virgin of Aparecida, that in 1946 Brazil renewed its consecration to the Immaculate Heart of Mary. It should also be noted that since the 1940s, Brazil has always been at the forefront of the Marian movement throughout the world. Marian congregations have never ceased to flourish there; there are nearly 3,000 of them today, bringing together a large number of young people (the "Marianos")!

For Mary is truly "the beloved Queen of the Brazilian people".

Encyclopédie Mariale