Cimbres Marian apparition

Cimbres Marian apparitions are named as the set of visions of the Virgin Mary that occurred in 1936 and 1937 in the village of Cimbres, part of the Pernambuco municipality of Pesqueira. According to what is believed, the Virgin Mary would have appeared to two seers, Mary of Light (who later adopted the name Adelia on the occasion of her entry into religious life) and Mary of The Conception, who, at the time of the facts, were poor and uneducated adolescents. These events became famous for the rigor with which they were ascertained by German Father Joseph Kehrle, as well as for the content of the message that the Virgin Mary would have transmitted to the seers, alerting them about how Brazil would be punished with Communism.

Spread

Originally restricted to the region surrounding the city of Pesqueira, from where came most of the pilgrims of the shrine that stood there, the message of the apparitions has, in modern times, been spread throughout Brazil, especially at the initiative of priests such as Father Paulo Ricardo, the historian Ana Lígia Lira, as well as the great-niece of Sister Adelia, the engineer Auta Maria Monteiro de Carvalho, through her book O Encontro – Nossa Senhora e Sister Adélia.

Ecclesiastical recognition

Although they were, at first, viewed with discredit by ecclesial authorities, the apparitions gradually became accepted as worthy of faith by the Church, which recognized, in 2021, the supernatural character of the events that occurred at Cimbres. At the same time, the process of beatification of one of the seers, Sister Amelia, was initiated, which corroborates the church's audement with devotion to the Virgin Mary on the designation of Our Lady of Grace of Cimbres.

History of Marian demonstrations prior to the apparitions

The Region of Cimbres, the scene of the apparitions, has a prolific history of Marian devotions and supernatural events associated with the Virgin Mary. Being in the interior of the territory of the Xucuru Indians, the settlement of the village is closely related to the settlement of the indigenous communities of the site at the initiative of the Oratorian priests, still in the early seventeenth century. having removed her from the site and taken her to the presence of the priests of the village, who took it for himself.

According to reports at the time, when they woke up, the priests could not find the image that had been brought to them, and began to look for it, suspecting that someone might have stolen it. After searches, they found her in the exact trunk where she had been found the day before, and once again took her with her. The next day, the statue was again gone, and this time the priests went straight to the trunk of the previous day, where they once again found it. Convinced that such events had been divine in their origin, the Oratorian fathers erected a chapel on the meeting place of the image, the altar of which was at the same place and height as the trunk on which the statue appeared. The Virgin enthroned in the chapel came to be known as Our Lady of the Mountains, given the rugged topography of the site of their meeting, being the target of special devotion of the Xukuru indigenous to this day, who designate her Mother Tamaim.

Context and general chronology of appearances

Cimbres, a few kilometers from the headquarters of the municipality of Pesqueira, was, at the time, a poor community, inhabited almost entirely by the Xukuru indigenous, who cultivated the land and practiced plant extraction for subsistence. The whole region was the scene of intense conflicts between the local population and groups of cangaceiros, some of which stood out for the extreme violence they acted for, and the reports of murders and rapes committed by the members of these organizations were not rare. In this context, countless families (especially those with teenage daughters, fearful that the girls would be sexually assaulted) took refuge in the nearby caatingas, and it was not uncommon for them to remain hidden for days on end until their return home could be safely made.

One of the families to use this artifice was that of Maria da Luz Teixeira, who, during the month of May 1936, remained a refugee in a forest near the place of the apparitions for a few days. The matriarch of the family, Auta Monteiro Teixeira, could not go into hiding, because she was in an advanced state of pregnancy, on days of giving birth. In fact, shortly after the family left for refuge in the caatinga, Auta began to feel the contractions of childbirth, and alone conceived a boy, who called Lygio. Realizing that the child was weak, and that she probably would not live long, she would have told her son that if she died, she asked the Virgin Mary to turn her eyes to the people of those lands, so that they would not suffer as much as they suffered at that time. The fears of the matriarch eventually came to fruition, and the son Lygio died shortly thereafter, an event that is often pointed out as the theological landmark of Marian events that would be unveiled a few months later; the apparitions.

The fact that the apparitions are related to the request of a mother in despair for the loss of a child are often pointed out as a connecting thread between the supernatural facts that occurred there and those of La Salette, as it will develop later.