Between fire rays and sun turns: Marian appearances and the writing of anticommunist messages (Brazil and Portugal)

Abstract

The Marian apparitions are one of the main phenomena of Catholicism. It is a belief that permeated the different moments of Christianity and marked the proliferation of written records legitimating the formation of sanctuaries, in which the memories of the seers, the miracles of the apparition and the content of the Marian messages are elucidated. This article focuses on the mnemonic records on the Marian messages that occurred in the first four decades of the twentieth century in Brazil and Portugal. Thus, through ecclesiastical inquiries and epistolary writing, we elucidate the anti-Communist content present in the memoirs about the Marian apparitions of Our Lady of Fatima in Portugal (1917), Our Lady of the Tears of Blood, in Campinas, Brazil (1930) And Our Lady of the Graces of Cimbres, Pernambuco, Brazil (1936). With this, we will emphasize the trajectory of the seers (Lúcia, Amália and Adélia), who began to work in different religious congregations and the propagation of the anticommunist ideas throughout the first half of century XX, mainly, during the decade of 30, in which Brazil and Portugal were under the validity of the respective governments of the “Estado Novo”. In this sense, it becomes possible to understand the constitution of a devotional political culture linked to the struggle against communist expansion and the strengthening of the Soviet Union, in which the formation of the new Marian shrines began to express the element of resistance.