In the early 1960s, Brazil was sliding toward communism. President Joao Goulart had taken office in 1961 and was moving the country sharply to the left. He surrounded himself with communist advisers, proposed radical land reforms modeled on Marxist principles, and made increasingly authoritarian moves that alarmed both the Brazilian military and the deeply Catholic civilian population. By early 1964, many Brazilians feared that their country was about to become the next Cuba.
The Catholic women of Brazil decided that the situation called not for political maneuvering but for prayer.
On March 13, 1964, President Goulart held a massive public rally in Rio de Janeiro, attended by over 150,000 supporters. He used the rally to announce sweeping decrees that his opponents viewed as a step toward establishing a communist dictatorship. Communist organizers had planned the event as a show of strength.
The Catholic women of Brazil responded six days later.
On March 19, 1964, the Feast of St. Joseph, head of the Holy Family, more than 600,000 women marched through the streets of Sao Paulo in what they called the “March of the Family with God toward Freedom” (Marcha da Familia com Deus pela Liberdade). The women carried rosaries and prayer books. They prayed the Rosary aloud as they marched. Their declaration read: “Mother of God, preserve us from the fate and suffering of the martyred women of Cuba, Poland, Hungary, and other enslaved nations.”
The march in Sao Paulo was followed by similar marches in cities across Brazil. In total, an estimated one million women took to the streets carrying rosaries and praying publicly for the preservation of their country from communism.
The impact was enormous. The marches demonstrated to the Brazilian military and to the world that the Brazilian people, and particularly the Catholic women who formed the backbone of Brazilian family life, were overwhelmingly opposed to the Goulart government’s direction. Within days, on April 1, 1964, the military intervened and Goulart was removed from power without significant bloodshed. He fled to Uruguay.
Whether one views the subsequent political developments as entirely positive or as complex and mixed, the historical fact remains: the Catholic women of Brazil organized the largest Rosary-based public demonstration in the history of Latin America, and they did so at a moment when the outcome of their nation’s future was genuinely in doubt. They chose the Rosary as their weapon, and the course of Brazilian history was altered.
Sources: The Michael Journal, “In 1964, the women of Brazil saved their country from Communism” and “The miracle of the Rosary in Brazil”; the Cambridge University Press journal article by Margaret Power, “Who but a Woman? The Transnational Diffusion of Anti-Communism among Conservative Women in Brazil, Chile, and the United States during the Cold War” (Journal of Latin American Studies, 2015); and the America Needs Fatima rosary resources archive.