Prayer to Our Lady of Aparecida: a new text and the story of 1717
The prayer
Our Lady of Aparecida, who came out of the river in pieces and was gathered up by the hands of poor men, ask God for me and for my country.
It was night, and there was no fish, when those men found you. That is how most good things arrive: late, when nobody is expecting them any more.
Keep those who work and see no result. Keep those raising a child alone, those who travel before dawn, those who hold a household together on what is left over.
Let me not get used to injustice and not lose my gladness because of it. Let my faith fit into the whole week, and not only into the day of the feast.
Amen.
In short
This is a prayer to Our Lady of Aparecida written for this site and signed by the person who wrote it. The devotion begins in 1717, when three Brazilian fishermen pulled a small clay statue from a river in two pieces and then filled their nets.
- Written by
- Raphael Navarro Schmitt
- Reviewed by
- Maria Luisa Navarro Schmitt
- Published on
- Reading time
- 6 min read
When to pray it
On 12 October, and on any ordinary day of hard work. It is the prayer of someone asking for themselves and for their country in the same breath.
The prayer above asks for people who work and see no result, and that is not social decoration. The founding scene of this devotion is a fishing shift that produced nothing — three men in a canoe at night, with an empty net and a banquet to supply. Anyone praying to Aparecida is praying out of a story about frustrated work, and the prayer would do badly to pretend otherwise.
The text is ours and it is signed. The anonymous texts circulating under this name are modern compositions, and presenting them as traditional prayer would leave the reader thinking they were praying something with centuries of use behind it. The devotion is three hundred years old; most of the prayers circulating with its name are a few decades old, and the difference deserves saying.
Catholic devotion holds that God is the one who grants and that asking Mary is asking for intercession. Most Protestant and evangelical churches do not hold that practice and pray directly to God — and in Brazil that is not a footnote but the daily experience of half the families in the country, who hold both practices at the same lunch table. This page describes both and arbitrates neither.
There is one thing Brazilian devotion does well and it deserves naming: it has never separated the personal request from the request for the country. People who climb the ramp of the basilica pray for a son and for Brazil in the same sentence. The prayer above keeps that joining on purpose, because removing it would describe a different devotion.
Where this prayer comes from
When it appeared October 1717, on the ParaĂba do Sul river in Brazil; this text was written in 2026
In October 1717 three fishermen — JoĂŁo Alves, Filipe Pedroso and Domingos Garcia — were casting nets in the ParaĂba do Sul river, near Guaratinguetá, to supply a banquet for a governor passing through. They were catching nothing. One cast brought up the body of a small clay statue, headless; the next brought the head; then came fish in quantity. The figure is about thirty-six centimetres tall and is attributed to a seventeenth-century potter.
The devotion grew first in the fishermen’s house, then in a chapel, then in a basilica that is today the largest Marian shrine in the world by capacity. Pius XI declared her patroness of Brazil in 1930, and 12 October has been a national holiday since 1980. The dark colour of the statue, much discussed, has plain and non-competing explanations: the clay used, the decades under water, and nearly a century of candle smoke in a small chapel.
The texts circulating in Portuguese as “prayer to Our Lady of Aparecida” are largely modern devotional compositions published without a declared author on leaflets and holy cards. So this page carries a prayer of our own, written for it and signed, and reserves this space for the history, which is solid, documented and more interesting than any anonymous text.
Little-known details
It is not an apparition, and the difference is large
The statue came up in two pieces, in that order
It has been stolen and smashed, in 1978
The statue would fit in a shoebox
What the passages say
4Then, when he had ceased speaking, he said to Simon, “Lead us into deep water, and release your nets for a catch.”
5And in response, Simon said to him: “Teacher, working throughout the night, we caught nothing. But on your word, I will release the net.”
6And when they had done this, they enclosed such a copious multitude of fish that their net was rupturing.
7And they signaled to their associates, who were in the other boat, so that they would come and help them. And they came and filled both boats, so that they were nearly submerged.
The passage closest to the scene of 1717: fishermen who worked all night and caught nothing, and who, casting again, filled the nets to the point of needing help. The resemblance between the Gospel narrative and the Guaratinguetá account is probably why the story was told that way, and that is not a problem — it is how religious memory works.
46And Mary said: “My soul magnifies the Lord.
47And my spirit leaps for joy in God my Savior.
48For he has looked with favor on the humility of his handmaid. For behold, from this time, all generations shall call me blessed.
49For he who is great has done great things for me, and holy is his name.
Mary’s canticle, which the liturgy calls the Magnificat. The line that matters most to this devotion is the one about God looking on a lowly condition — and it is why a small dark statue found by fishermen made immediate sense in colonial Brazil.
14All these were persevering with one accord in prayer with the women, and with Mary, the mother of Jesus, and with his brothers.
The only scene in the New Testament where Mary is shown praying together with the community after the resurrection. It is the text Catholic tradition uses as grounds for the idea that she prays with the Church — and note that she is among the others there, not in front of them.
18And Jesus, walking near the Sea of Galilee, saw two brothers, Simon who is called Peter, and his brother Andrew, casting a net into the sea (for they were fishermen).
19And he said to them: “Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men.”
20And at once, leaving behind their nets, they followed him.
The calling of the first disciples, all of them fishermen. Worth reading alongside the story of 1717 for the same reason: in Christianity, people who work with nets turn up early and turn up often, and Brazilian devotion inherited that preference without ever having to explain it.