First Catholic saint for Brazil after five centuries

Antonio de Sant'Anna Galvao, aka Frei Galvao

As Pope Benedict XVI visits Brazil, from the Daily Herald in Utah, USA:

Brazil, world’s biggest Catholic country, to get its first native-born saint …

Grossi de Almeida attributes the miracle of her son’s birth to a paper “pill” inscribed with a prayer that she ate during her pregnancy.

The Vatican agrees, pronouncing Enzzo one of the two miracles needed to declare the creator of the pills, an 18th-century Franciscan monk named Antonio de Sant’Anna Galvao, a saint.

The May 11 canonization of Galvao, Brazil’s first native-born saint, will be the centerpiece event when Pope Benedict XVI visits Brazil this month.

Many say it also will be a watershed in the Roman Catholic Church’s battle to fight the loss of adherents to fast-growing Pentecostal churches.

So, Brazil is the biggest Roman Catholic country in the world.

Catholicism has been there for five centuries.

Antônio de Sant’Anna Galvão has been dead for almost two centuries.

Only now, the biggest Catholic country gets its first saint.

While Europe has thousands and thousands of them.

Europe, where practically all popes are from, certainly after antiquity, though by now a relatively small minority of the faithful live in Europe.

Antonio de Sant’Anna Galvao at least really lived, what is more than can be said about some European saints.

Take Saint George.

If he ever lived, he never had anything to do with the two things where he is most famous for: dragons and England (eat your heart out, English nationalists. The cult of St George reached England a thousand years after he is said to have lived. He is said to have been from present day Turkey which you hate so much).