The Building
The Architecture of Little Rome
Two naves that open like a pair of compasses and meet at a single altar. Twenty-four arches turned in lime and palm sap, holding a roof that has no iron in it. Twin towers of ninety-two feet — and a village that took its name from them.
The Idea
It is a church you can read like a creed — a building where every number in the stone is set down to stand for a truth of the faith.
When the Jesuits set out to raise the third and greatest church at Vadakkankulam, Fr Joseph Grégoire gave it a form found almost nowhere else: a single building shaped like an open pair of compasses — two naves splayed wide at the doors, drawing together as they run east, until they meet at one shared altar.
Seventeen years went into the building of it, and what rose was strange enough that a Jesuit chronicler called the plan “probably without equal in the world.” The village has been called Little Rome ever since.
- 17
- years building
- 24
- arches
- 92
- feet of tower
- 5
- doors
- 0
- iron in the roof
- 1
- altar
Before This One
Three Churches, One Ground
The great church of 1872 is the third to stand on this ground. Each of the first two was outgrown by the congregation that raised it.
1685
A chapel of palm thatch
Beside Santhaayi’s wayside cross, St John de Britto blesses a small thatched chapel; some two hundred people are baptised.
1752
The church of stone
Fr Buttari’s cross-shaped stone church, finished by Fr Tomassini in broad brick from Perungudi. Its statue would weep in 1803, and its bell would call the village to come and see.
1872
The great church
Bishop Canoz blesses the foundation stone in 1855. Seventeen years later he returns to sing the Mass that dedicates the building standing today.
The Meaning
The Church as a Creed
The parish reads its own building as a set of numbers. Nothing here is merely structural: every count is a doctrine. Read the plan itself as a creed — tap a line and it lights on the drawing — then read the rest in the parish's own hand, the numbers that wait up at the altar.
Redrawn from வரைபடம் 5 in A. Sivasubramanian, Kiristhavamum Sathiyum (2001) — the only measured plan of this church in print.
The plan, read as a creed
Tap a reading to light it on the plan.
TEMPLVM SIT DVPLEX, ARA SED VNA; FIDES VNA SIT, VNAQVE MENS.
Let the temple be twofold, but the altar one; may they be of one faith, and of one mind.
Cut into the foundation stone, blessed 9 August 1855
The parish’s own note — திருக்குடும்ப ஆலயம்: கட்டிடத்தின் தத்துவம், “the philosophy of the building”
And what waits at the altar
- 14
the steps up to the cross
the fourteen Stations
- 5
the arches in the upper row of the altarpiece
the five wounds, told again
- 9
the flower-cluster carvings
the nine choirs of angels
- 4
the arches in the lower row
Matthew, Mark, Luke and John
- 3
at the centre of it all
Father, Son and Holy Spirit
The sheet is unsigned and undated. It records how the parish reads its church — not what the builders of 1855 are documented to have intended.
The Structure
Not a Nail of Iron
Twenty-four arches span the interior, twelve of them joined in a single crown over the altar. Not one is carried by cement, by iron, or by a wooden beam: they were turned in lime mortar and have stood self-supporting for a century and a half. The engineering was the work of Brother Joseph Bergenthal — a Jesuit lay brother whom almost no account of this church troubles to name.
- No cement
- lime mortar throughout
- No iron
- not a rod in the vaults
- No timber
- no beam, no pillar, no centring
What the mortar was made of
பதனீர்
padaneer
Palm sap
drawn from the palmyra, before it ferments
சுண்ணாம்பு
chunnambu
Lime
burnt shell and limestone — the binder
கடுக்காய்
kadukkai
Myrobalan
Terminalia chebula — the tannin that hardens it
முட்டை
muttai
Egg
beaten in, for a mortar that sets like stone
The recipe as the parish itself gives it. The English parish history says toddy — fermented sap — where the Tamil sources say padaneer; on lime, kadukkai and egg, every source agrees.
The Skyline
Why They Call It Little Rome
Two white towers stand ninety-two feet above the façade, octagonal from the ground to the spire, with sixteen smaller pinnacles ringing the roofline. In each tower hangs one of the twin bells cast in France in 1861 and carried here by sea. It is chiefly for these towers that, in 1926, the first Bishop of Tuticorin gave the village the name it still answers to — Chinna Romapuri, Little Rome.
- 92 ft
- twin octagonal towers
- 16
- pinnacle turrets
- 1861
- French bells, one to a tower
The Bells
The Twin Bells from France
High in each of the two towers hangs a bronze bell, cast in France in 1861 and carried to Vadakkankulam by sea. They have called the parish to prayer for more than a century and a half.
1861
Cast in France
The bells are given to the church by Casimir Grégoire, a French benefactor — by every account a kinsman of the parish priest, Fr Joseph Grégoire — and the bell in the tower still carries his name in its bronze: “Donateur Casimir Grégoire”.
By sea
The long carriage
Packed in wooden crates, the bells come by ship, land at the port of Madras, and pass through the Collector's office at Tirunelveli on their way south to the church.
1872
Raised into the towers
They are hung the year the church is consecrated — one bell to each of the twin towers — and are rung still, at prayers and at every festival.
These were not the first bells to sound here.
An older bell hung in the stone church of 1752 — the bell that was rung one October morning in 1803 to call the whole village to come and see the Mother whose statue had begun to weep.
The bells' story is the parish's own record. Published accounts have named the Burdin foundry of Lyon; the bell itself is cast “Vve Grégoire de Valence (Drôme)” — and where the record and the bronze differ, the bronze has the last word.
Light & Colour
Glass, Dye and Gold
Twenty-three traceries carry coloured glass — plain at first, replaced with jewelled panes at the centenary of 1972. Sixteen windows along the side walls were kept sealed shut through the whole Jesuit administration, “for reasons of cold,” and were opened only afterwards. Within, the vaults, arches and pillars are painted in flowers and scenery made not from paint or chemical but from the dyes of plants and trees — unfaded, and never once repainted.
What It Carries
The Two Images the Building Holds
Two images say what the church is for: one over the door you come in by, one above the altar you come to.
Over the door
Above the head-door, inside the porch, is a polychrome relief of the Holy Family beneath a dove in a golden gloria and, at the apex, an eye set in a triangle. It is the old Counter-Reformation figure of the Two Trinities — the heavenly and the earthly — crossing at the Child. The figures are original; the gilding and the blue sky behind them are not. That ground was repainted between 2016 and 2022.
The Two Trinities relief over the central door
Above the altar
Six statues stand at the high altar beneath its dome, its glass tower and its minaret: the crucified Christ at the centre, Our Lady and St Joseph beside him, and above them St Sebastian, St Antony and St Francis Xavier. The floor is mosaic. The woodwork carries gold leaf — பொன் முலாம் — which the parish has never let fade.
The high altar, gilded and unfaded
மரியே வாழ்க
“Hail Mary” — raised in Tamil letters across the gable of the porch. The first words the building says to anyone walking up to it.
Colophon
Builders, Bells & Sources
- Directing pastor
- Fr Joseph Grégoire, S.J.
- Architect & engineer
- Br Joseph Bergenthal, S.J.
- Consecrated by
- Bishop Alexis Canoz, S.J., 1872
- Bells
- Fonderie Vve Grégoire, Valence (Drôme), 1861
- Bells given by
- Casimir Grégoire
Architectural detail from the parish history of the Holy Family Church; A. Sivasubramanian, Kiristhavamum Sathiyum (2001); Auguste Jean, Le Maduré (1894); H. R. Pate, Madras District Gazetteer: Tinnevelly (1917); and a handwritten note kept at the parish.
Visit Us
You Are Always Welcome
Step inside whenever you wish. Our doors, like our hearts, remain open.