Ahead of Brazil’s election, claims spread online that candidate Flávio Bolsonaro was seeking to eliminate Our Lady of Aparecida’s status as Brazil’s patron saint.
André Mendonça, a minister of the Superior Electoral Court (TSE), ordered the removal on September 25 of posts linking the claim to the candidate and his family.
The removal order goes beyond a simple online dispute, showing the pressure false information can create in an election when combined with religious symbols.
3-Line Summary
1. Minister Mendonça ordered the removal of false posts
2. The posts concerned a claim about Our Lady linked to Bolsonaro
3. The spread may continue even after corrections
The Claim That the Candidate Had Introduced the Bill Was False
The posts in question claimed that Senator and presidential candidate Flávio Bolsonaro supported or was advancing a bill to eliminate the status of Our Lady of Aparecida as Brazil’s patron saint. Poder360 reported that Bolsonaro had not introduced such a proposal.
The controversy also mentioned bill PL 2.623/2007, submitted in 2007. According to CNN Brasil, the bill seeks to eliminate Our Lady of Aparecida’s status as patron saint, but its sponsor is Victorio Galli. Therefore, the existence of the bill alone does not support saying that candidate Flávio Bolsonaro introduced or supported it.
Minister André Mendonça’s removal order targeted posts that attributed responsibility for the bill to the candidate and his family. UOL also reported that Minister Mendonça’s decision to remove the posts had become controversial.
The Controversy Had Already Grown After the Removal Order
A Vox Radar survey cited by CNN Brasil collected approximately 18 million comments from the night of September 24 through the afternoon of 25, and 74% of them mentioned the rumor. However, this figure reflects an aggregation of online reactions and does not itself indicate an actual change in voting.
The survey found 68 comments stating that people who supported candidate Bolsonaro had withdrawn their support because of the rumor, representing 0.04% of the sample analyzed. Meanwhile, the survey found that the rumor reached users whose political leanings were difficult to identify and Catholic users more strongly.
Among 13,000 comments from users who identified themselves as Catholic, 47% showed reactions believing the rumor, while 14% refuted it. This illustrates how false claims involving religious symbols can spread more broadly through emotion and political interpretation even after the facts have been corrected.
The Issue Is Not the Bill’s Existence but Its Connection to the Candidate
In an August video, candidate Bolsonaro said, in essence, that if he became president, he would declare Brazil to be the nation of Jesus Christ. Some posts removed this statement from its context and connected it to the claim that he sought to eliminate Our Lady of Aparecida’s status.
Criticizing or evaluating a candidate’s statements about religion must be distinguished from presenting another existing bill as definitively being the candidate’s policy. The central issue identified by this removal order was not religious statements in general, but the false claim directly connecting a specific bill to the candidate.
During an election, posts that mix in some facts—such as a bill number or the past record of another person—can appear more plausible. In this case, verifying both the bill’s sponsor and whether the candidate actually proposed it is the starting point for assessing the claim.
References
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