Our Lady of Assumption — the Holy Family Shrine, Vadakkankulam, called Little RomeOur Ladyof Assumption

It was a Friday forenoon in the Tamil month of Aippasi, in a village that had gone a generation without a Jesuit. A man from Tirunelveli, Savarimuthu Pillai, had come over to see the European family settled here, and stopped in the church first to pray. Our Lady stood above the altar in a recess closed by a double door, and that morning both leaves were open. He knelt down.

What he said afterwards is that a thin cloud gathered behind her and wrapped her round; that her eyes lifted and filled, and the tears ran down her face; and that her folded hands parted and reached out until they touched the walls of the niche. Certain his own eyes were deceiving him, he went out and brought back the catechist Yagappar Pillai, and Henriette, the daughter of the house. They said they saw it too. A catechist climbed up to the altar and wiped her face, and the tears came again, and would not stop.

Then they rang the bell. It was not an hour at which the bell was ever rung, and the whole village put down its work and came in from the fields to find out why. They filled the church, lit the candles, knelt, and sang what a frightened people sings: Parce Domine, parce populo tuo, spare, O Lord, spare your people. And while they were praying, the face above the altar became an ordinary carved face again. Not a sign given to a bishop or a scholar, they say, but to farmers with the field still on them. And the village has come back to it every October for the two hundred and twenty-three years since.