On the last day of September, with Brazil’s presidential election just four days away, the Superior Electoral Court stepped into a storm that mixed faith, politics, race, and social media in a way that felt almost impossible to untangle. The judges were asked to rule on a series of online posts accusing Senator Flávio Bolsonaro, the son of former President Jair Bolsonaro and the Liberal Party candidate for the presidency, of backing an alleged initiative to strip Our Lady of Aparecida of her title as the patroness of Brazil. To millions of Brazilians, especially Catholics, the accusation was not merely a political attack. It was an assault on a sacred figure who has watched over the country for centuries—a small, dark-skinned statue found by fishermen in 1717, venerated as a mother, a protector, and a symbol of a people that includes a large Black and mixed-race majority. The court, meeting in a virtual plenary session, ruled on Sept. 30 that content clearly linking the senator to the supposed measure must be removed from social media. But it also decided that posts containing reasonable ambiguity about that link could stay online. In doing so, the court tried to walk a razor-thin line: protecting the integrity of the election and the dignity of religious devotion, while refusing to transform the judiciary into a censor of every heated expression in a polarized digital landscape.
At the center of the controversy was a post by the Brazilian comedian Antonio Tabet, published on X on Sept. 24. Tabet shared an image of Our Lady of Aparecida, the dark Madonna whose face reflects the country’s African heritage and whose shrine in São Paulo is among the largest places of Catholic pilgrimage in the world. His caption was deliberately provocative: “The militia family hates black women so much that they decided to attack Our Lady of Aparecida.” The post did not mention Flávio Bolsonaro by name. It did not say he had proposed legislation, filed a motion, or even spoken publicly about the patroness. But for anyone familiar with Brazilian political slang, the phrase “militia family” was unmistakably aimed at the Bolsonaros—a reference to accusations that some members of their political circle had connections to Rio de Janeiro’s brutal armed militias, groups that extort neighborhoods and operate with a kind of terrifying impunity. The image of the Black Madonna was not chosen by accident. It was chosen precisely because she is so beloved, so maternal, and so deeply embedded in the national soul that to accuse someone of attacking her is to place that person outside the moral community of Brazil. The next day, Sept. 25, Justice André Mendonça, the vice president of the court and the rapporteur for the case, ordered the removal of content that asserted Bolsonaro or his family intended to strip Aparecida of her title. The initial order appeared to sweep Tabet’s post into that category.
But when Mendonça reconsidered his own vote, he found himself facing a difficult legal and philosophical question: should a post that does not explicitly name a candidate be treated as a false accusation against that candidate, especially when it rides on the back of a much wider narrative? He concluded that there was reasonable doubt. Tabet’s post could be read as satire, as hyperbole, or as a kind of political commentary that did not claim a concrete legislative initiative had been undertaken by the senator. Under Brazilian electoral law, the courts are supposed to intervene as little as possible in speech, especially speech that touches on religion, satire, and public debate. Mendonça decided that the principle of minimal intervention, combined with the heightened protection owed to freedom of expression, meant the post should stay online. “As it is reasonable to take the content to be ambiguous,” he said, “I believe the solution most consistent with the criteria of minimal intervention and heightened protection of freedom of expression is to keep the post online.” He was careful to say that his change of heart did not apply to posts that explicitly named Flávio Bolsonaro. Those, he insisted, were objectively false and could rightfully be removed. Nor did his ruling amount to prior restraint or a restriction on religious freedom. Faith itself was never on trial. He expressed frustration at the idea that the Court had tried to stop Catholics from honoring Our Lady. “Confusing a ‘fake news’ report with a restriction on faith represents a distortion of the decision’s actual substance,” he said. “The insinuation that the decisions issued in these proceedings sought to prevent Catholics from expressing support for or devotion to Our Lady of Aparecida is particularly baffling. Nothing, absolutely nothing, in the decisions warrants such a conclusion.”
Justice Nunes Marques, who presided over the court, agreed with Mendonça’s conclusion but added a warning of his own about the danger of allowing context to do the work of explicit accusation. He argued that the contested post did not need to name the candidate to attribute the claim to him. It had been published at the height of the false narrative’s circulation, accompanied by the image of the patroness herself, and it relied on the broader news environment to make its meaning unmistakable. In other words, a reader scrolling through X in late September would not have needed a name in the caption to know whom the comedian meant. The message was fully realized only because of the current political climate in which it was embedded. Still, Marques ultimately concurred with Mendonça’s decision to preserve Tabet’s post, and he emphasized that the court’s relief protected something larger than any single candidate or comedian. “In my view,” he said, “the relief granted protects religious freedom in its collective and democratic dimension, as it prevents the faith of millions of Brazilians from being instrumentalized within days of the election through a claim without a factual basis designed to artificially stir up emotional reactions among the electorate.” His difference of opinion on Tabet’s post did not change the overall effect of the ruling. The court remained united on the core issue: that the claim about stripping Our Lady of Aparecida of her title was a lie, that it threatened the peace of the election, and that it had to be addressed without sacrificing the country’s commitment to free speech.
The deeper meaning of the case can only be understood by appreciating what Our Lady of Aparecida actually represents in Brazilian life. She is not a remote theological abstraction. She is a maternal presence whose image has looked out over Brazil for more than three centuries. The statue, found in the Paraíba River by fishermen who had prayed for a good catch, is made of clay and darkened over time by river water and candle smoke. Her dark skin has made her a powerful symbol of a country that was built on the labor and faith of Africans and their descendants, and her shrine at Aparecida draws millions of pilgrims every year. Popes have visited her basilica. Her feast day, Oct. 12, is a national holiday. To accuse a leading political candidate of wanting to strip her of her title as patroness is not a theological quibble; it is an attempt to brand him as an enemy of the religious and cultural heart of Brazil. In a campaign already saturated with anger, suspicion, and social media fire, such an accusation could shift votes and inflame passions in ways that have little to do with the truth. The court’s ruling recognized this danger. By removing content that explicitly made the false claim, while allowing a more ambiguous piece of satire to survive, the judges were trying to preserve both the factual integrity of the election and the rough, combative freedom of expression that characterizes Brazilian democracy. They were also making a statement about the limits of judicial power: courts can remove lies, but they cannot, and should not, try to patrol every metaphor or joke.
In the end, the ruling is best understood as an attempt to hold two values in balance. On one side is the right of voters to make their choices in an environment free from deliberate and dangerous falsehoods, especially falsehoods that use religion to manipulate emotions. On the other side is the right of citizens to speak boldly, to satirize, to disagree, and even to offend. The court chose to defend both. It struck down the explicit lies, because those were the most corrosive to the democratic process and the most disrespectful to the faith of millions. It allowed the ambiguous post to remain, because a free society must tolerate uncertainty and irreverence, and because the remedy for bad speech is more speech, not more censorship. The decision also sent a message to political actors of every side: religious faith cannot be used as a weapon in an election campaign. Our Lady of Aparecida is not a meme to be deployed for partisan advantage, and the devotion of the Brazilian people is not a resource to be mined for votes. By avoiding the temptation to ban all content that mentioned the episode, the court resisted the politics of fear and reaffirmed that the real danger is not debate—it is deception. The case, first reported by ACI Digital, the Portuguese-language service of EWTN News, and later translated and adapted for English readers, offers a striking example of how an electoral court must sometimes act as a guardian of the national soul, clarifying facts without silencing voices, and protecting faith without putting it on trial.