On March 19, 1534, the feast of Saint Joseph, a boy was born in the town of San Cristóbal de La Laguna, on the island of Tenerife, in the Canary Islands. In honor of the saint of the day, he was named José, which is Joseph in Spanish. José de Anchieta grew up listening to the sound of the sea and watching the ships sail off toward distant lands, never imagining that one day he would cross that ocean himself and never come back.

At fourteen, José traveled to Portugal to study in the famous city of Coimbra. He was a brilliant student who loved books, languages, and, above everything else, poetry. At seventeen, in 1551, he made a decision that would change his life: he joined the Society of Jesus, the order of the Jesuit priests, which sent missionaries to the four corners of the world.

It was around this time that his first great trial came. A problem in his spine left José with a bent, aching back for the rest of his life. The doctors could not cure him, and his superiors thought that perhaps the warm air of a new land might do him good. And so, in 1553, young José set sail with other Jesuits for Brazil, an immense land about which Europeans still knew very little.

A Mass on the High Plateau

After a voyage full of dangers, José arrived at the village of São Vicente, on the coast. But the Jesuits wanted to climb the mountains to the highlands, where the air was cool and many indigenous peoples lived. Up on the plateau, near a village beside a river, they built a little house of clay and straw that served as both school and chapel.

On January 25, 1554, the feast of the conversion of Saint Paul, the priests celebrated the first Mass there. Because of that day's feast, they named the place the College of São Paulo de Piratininga. Around that simple little school a village grew, and the village became a town, and the town grew so much that today it is one of the largest cities in the world: São Paulo. And José de Anchieta, only nineteen years old, was there at the very beginning of it all.

In the little school on the plateau, Anchieta became a teacher. He taught reading, writing, and prayers to indigenous boys and to the sons of the Portuguese, all sitting together on the same benches. But he did something few Europeans ever bothered to do: instead of waiting for others to learn his language, he set out to learn theirs.

The Priest Who Spoke Tupi

Anchieta fell in love with the Tupi language, spoken by many peoples along the coast of Brazil. He found it beautiful, full of music and vivid images. He listened carefully to the elders of the villages, wrote down words, asked questions, repeated, and learned. In time he spoke Tupi so well that he composed poems and even plays in that language, so that he could tell the stories of God in a way everyone could understand.

And he did not stop there. Anchieta wrote the first grammar of the Tupi language, a book that taught other people how to speak and write it. Thanks to that work, much of the beauty of old Tupi was never lost to time. The indigenous people saw that this small priest with the bent back truly respected them, and many became his friends.

The Poem Written in the Sand

But not everything was peaceful in that land. Portuguese colonists were seizing lands and taking prisoners, and the Tamoio peoples, weary of so much injustice, joined together in a great alliance to make war on them. The fighting threatened to destroy everything, and no one seemed able to make peace.

Then, in 1563, Anchieta and Father Manuel da Nóbrega made a courageous decision. They traveled unarmed to Iperoig, where the city of Ubatuba stands today, to speak face to face, as equals, with the Tamoio chiefs. Because Anchieta spoke Tupi, he could listen to that people's grievances and answer them with respect. To prove that the offer of peace was sincere, Nóbrega went back to negotiate with the Portuguese, while Anchieta stayed behind in the village, alone among the Tamoio, as the guarantee of the promise they had given.

Months of waiting followed. Through the long afternoons by the sea, Anchieta walked along the beach praying to the Virgin Mary. And there he made a promise of his own: he would compose a great poem in her honor. But he had no paper, no quill, no ink. So he wrote his verses in the wet sand of the beach, memorized every line, and then the waves rolled in and washed it all away. The next day he wrote more verses, and stored every one of them in his memory.

When peace was finally agreed — the treaty known as the Peace of Iperoig — Anchieta returned to his Jesuit brothers. Only then did he put down on paper the whole poem he had carried in his head: nearly five thousand verses in honor of the Virgin Mary, kept by heart, one by one.

The Apostle of Brazil

In 1566, José de Anchieta was ordained a priest in Bahia. He went on traveling the coast of Brazil on foot and by canoe, aching back and all, founding villages, schools, and churches. He was also there in the earliest days of another city being born: Rio de Janeiro. Wherever he went, he taught, cared for the sick, and defended the indigenous peoples against the cruelty of the colonists.

When he was old, he went to live in a quiet village called Reritiba, in Espírito Santo, among the indigenous friends he had lived beside all his life. It was there that he died, on June 9, 1597. It is said that about three thousand indigenous people accompanied his body, weeping for the man who had been their teacher, their defender, and their friend. Today the village is called Anchieta, in his honor.

For his tireless work, José de Anchieta received a beautiful title: the Apostle of Brazil. In 1980, Pope John Paul II declared him blessed. And on April 3, 2014, Pope Francis, himself a Jesuit, proclaimed him a saint. The boy from the Canary Islands who wrote poems in the sand became Saint Joseph of Anchieta, one of the patron saints of Brazil.