[1] The main purpose of the devotion is for the Catholic Church to remind its members and believers to remember the Passion of Christ and prepare them for the celebrations of the Holy Week.

One legend about the origin of this particular statue of Jesus in Macau says that in a deep winter night, the sleeping sexton heard someone knocking on the cathedral door, but did not answer the call; so the Hallowed Guest ended up going to St Augustine’s Church, where the statue is kept throughout the year, to be processed back to the Cathedral once a year and spend that missed long winter night there.

[2] Another story claims that after a terrible storm, huge wooden crates were washed ashore, and they turn out to contain mountable body parts that were eventually pieced together to form this miraculous statue.

There was such a great famine that the Macanese merchants went to the City Chancellor on the 14th of February 1721 asking that the "wooden man" carried on the people's back would come out onto the street again, at their own expense.

[5][6] The earliest recorded statue of the Bom Jesus was made of wood and its scaffold came from Brazil, being brought by Commander Domingos Pio Marques, who arrived here on the ship Ulisses on October 14, 1818; he had gone to Rio, as a deputy from Macau, to attend the festivities acclaiming the throne of King John VI of Portugal celebrated on February 6, 1818.

Count Bernardino de Senna Fernandes, treasurer of the Brotherhood of the Bom Jesus dos Passos, offered, on February 12, 1876, one hundred patacas to buy a new image that he himself ordered from Paris.

This custom still persists today in Hong Kong, where an annual procession organized by the respective Brotherhood takes place in the Cathedral on the second Sunday of Lent.

In the Rosary Church in Kowloon, an image is exposed for veneration by the faithful for a fortnight (coinciding with novenas in Macau and Hong Kong) and according to old residents this practice must be at least fifty years old.

The bishop, with the secular and regular clergy, the governor, the ministers, the nobility, the military and the entire Roman Catholic population, can be said to watch, deeply moved by a scene that foretells the divine sacrifice that will be made to reconcile man with his Creator.

At 7 pm, the Statue of the cross-bearing Bom Jesus, (veiled in purple lace to symbolize Our Lord being brought to trial), is carried down to the Sé Catedral da Natividade de Nossa Senhora.

At the time when the convents were full of friars - Franciscans, Dominicans and Augustines, in addition to the numerous Jesuits of St. Paul and St. Joseph and the entire diocesan clergy, all either with their religious habits or with their black cloaks and bishop at the front, this procession must have been very imposing.

The bishop, carrying the relic of the True Cross under a canopy, participates in the procession together with the Canons, clergy, twelve children dressed in white, torch-bearers and banner-bearers representing each parish.

[13] A young girl is chosen each year to perform the role of Veronica, and sings the O vos omnes while unveiling the cloth depicting the Holy Face each time the procession stops for a stational shrine.