🇧🇷 Brazil
Our Lady of Aparecida honors a dark clay statue of the Virgin Mary, venerated by Brazilian Catholics as the country's principal patroness. The statue is kept in the National Shrine in the city of Aparecida in São Paulo state, and her feast is celebrated every year on October 12.
The feast falls on October 12 every year and ranks as a solemnity in the Roman Rite calendar approved for Brazil. It is also a national public holiday, so the date is a day off across the country. The focal point is the National Shrine in Aparecida, where the statue is housed in a vast basilica. Catholics around Brazil mark the day with Masses and devotions to Our Lady Aparecida.
According to the traditional account, in October 1717 three fishermen, Domingos Garcia, João Alves, and Filipe Pedroso, went to the Paraíba River to catch fish for a feast honoring a visiting governor. After a poor start they hauled up a headless clay statue of Mary and then its head, and their nets afterward filled with fish. The dark clay figure of Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception became a lasting symbol of faith for Brazilians, and the Church eventually recognized Our Lady Aparecida as the country's principal patron.
Brazil's law making October 12 a national holiday was signed on June 30, 1980, during Pope John Paul II's first visit to the country, the same trip on which he consecrated the new basilica.
In Brazil the date is shared with Children's Day, a popular non-religious occasion, while much of the Americas links October 12 to Columbus's 1492 landfall. Brazil's holiday stands apart as a religious feast rather than an anniversary of that voyage.
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