Maria de Carvalho Leite was born in Bonfim de Feira (Brazil) on 10 September 1900, the daughter of Hermenegildo Leite, a municipal employee, and Balmina de Carvalho Leite, a domestic worker. She spent her childhood in Bonfim with three brothers and two sisters.

In 1916 she graduated as a teacher at the Educandário dos Perdões, considered by her classmates and teachers as a teenage prodigy, thanks to her rare intelligence.

She began to feel poetry in her hometown, when she was almost a child, and later became the poet of good verses.

Some of her poems were collected in the book "Ciranda da Vida". Recognised in the capital for her art, she went on to write for the newspapers "Diário de Notícias" and "O Imparcial", where she was editor-in-chief of the "Women's Page". For 13 years she wrote for these newspapers, showing a world of tenderness that she carried within her, using the pseudonym "Maria Dolores".

Maria taught at the Educandário dos Perdões and at the Ginásio Carneiro Ribeiro in Salvador. That is why we understand her special way of teaching afflicted souls through her verses.

But her life could not be all flowers: an ordeal of moral suffering awaited her.

She had married the doctor Odilon Machado. She endured an unhappy partnership for some years and finally separated. There were no children from this union, and Maria would never have any.

On her pilgrimage, she lived in several cities in Bahia, and it was in Itabuna that she met Carlos Carmine Larocca, an Italian living in Brazil; she became his companion, helping him shoulder to shoulder in his activities.

We can see in her verses how much she had suffered, searching for something she could not find: her affective fulfilment, as providence had planned, in order to seek the Greater Love she knew she would one day find – Jesus! So much suffering could not make her indifferent to human suffering. In the press, she spoke of human rights and the suffering of the most disadvantaged. She was not understood: she was branded a "communist" and had to respond to the accusations made against her because she had been quoted.

As a child she had been a Catholic; as an adult, suffering introduced her to the doctrine of Allan Kardec, and consolation came, the acceptance of suffering.

She became an integral member of the Legion of Good Will, with her open and idealistic spirit.

She organised campaigns and made gifts for the bazaars held in her own home. She founded a group that met in her house every week, when they went out to distribute food, clothes and medicine in the chosen needy neighbourhoods. They were called "The Messengers of Good". At Christmas, they organised campaigns and distributed donations, as well as on Mother's Day. Dolores sewed trousseaus, sold what she had or lent it out; sometimes she went into debt to help someone else.

She had a strong sense of motherhood and, as she was not given the right to be a mother, she adopted six girls. Charles (her husband) was in Italy when Maria fell ill with pneumonia. On 27 August 1959 she left for her spiritual homeland.