Frei Galvão founded the Recolhimento of Our Lady of the Conception of Divine Providence — the Mosteiro da Luz — with Sister Helena Maria of the Holy Spirit on 2 February 1774, and is buried in its church. By the account the Dicastery for the Causes of Saints gives, he once wrote a line from the Office of Our Lady — 'Post partum, Virgo, inviolata permansisti: Dei Genitrix, intercede pro nobis' ('After childbirth, O Virgin, you remained inviolate: Mother of God, intercede for us') — on a scrap of paper, rolled it like a pill and sent it to a young man dying of kidney stones, whose pain ceased; then did the same for a woman in a dangerous labour, whose child was born quickly.
The Conceptionist sisters of the Luz still make the pills by hand, on rice paper, and give them freely, three at a time over a novena; the Franciscans make them too at his birthplace, Guaratinguetá. They are a devotion — the Franciscans say plainly that they are no substitute for a doctor. The Dicastery notes that most of the graces reported at the Luz concern tumours, kidney stones, pregnancy, childbirth and infertility.
The Church examined two cures. In 1990 Daniella Cristina da Silva, aged four, lay in hospital with acute hepatitis, pneumonia, a cardiac and respiratory arrest, meningitis and failing kidneys and liver; by her family's account they gave her the pills in a novena, and she went home weeks later. That cure was accepted for his beatification by John Paul II on 25 October 1998. Then Sandra Grossi de Almeida, whose malformed uterus had cost her three pregnancies, conceived in 1999, took the pills in a novena when she began to bleed, and on 11 December 1999 gave birth by caesarean, at thirty-two weeks, to a son, Enzo. The medical board, as reported in Brazil, judged the outcome 'scientifically inexplicable as a whole'; the decree recognising the miracle was promulgated on 16 December 2006, and Benedict XVI canonised Frei Galvão in São Paulo on 11 May 2007, in his homily greeting the sisters 'of the Mosteiro da Luz'.
The house is now both a convent and, in its old wing, São Paulo's Museu de Arte Sacra.