A Story Carried by Generations

02 / 07

1606

The mission that turned inland

For sixty years more the faith kept to the shore. Christianity, one historian wrote, lay entrenched without the walls of India. Then, on 10 November 1606, a small party rode out of Tuticorin for Madurai, and among them was a Roman nobleman's son named Roberto de Nobili. He found every door closed to him until he put off his European dress and took up the life of a sannyasi — one who resigns or abandons all. He learned Tamil and Sanskrit, ate once a day, and was let in. The inland mission he opened was passed down from one man to the next, and in 1683 it came into the hands of a Portuguese Jesuit of the royal household at Lisbon: John de Britto. From Madurai, de Britto came south.

03 / 07

c.1680

Santhaayi Ammaiyar and her cross

About the year 1680 a Christian woman named Santhaayi Ammaiyar came with her family out of Thoppuvilai and stopped at a place that was then nothing but forest — bush, trees and pits, and a tank on its northern side that gave the place its name. She built her house there. Because she was firm in her faith she raised a little roadside crusadi, a cross-shrine, in the open ground facing her door, and she prayed at it where anyone passing could see her. Others came and built beside her. A settlement gathered around one woman's cross.

04 / 07

c.1684

The priest on the forest road

The village stood on the old forest road, “a stopping place between Travancore and the Pandiyan kingdom,” where travellers going either way broke their journey. One morning Santhaayi was out gathering cotton when a priest came riding by. She ran to him and asked him to bless her house and the little cross she had raised beside her door, and he stopped his horse and did. His name was John de Britto, though the Tamils called him Arulanandar, the joy of grace. He had ridden as far south as this village, and no further. It was a hard country; only a year before, he had written that it was “unstable as the waves of the sea, shifting like the sands of the desert.” Yet the little cross he blessed that morning outlasted all of it, and everything the village would become began there.

05 / 07

1685

A chapel of thatch

More families came, and the faith spread until the cross by Santhaayi's door could no longer hold them all. By 1685 they had built themselves a church, a small thing of thatch. Those were the years the whole Madura mission was in de Britto's charge. Every church that followed it was larger than the last.

06 / 07

1685–86

The first harvest

In these years de Britto was baptising thousands across the south. In one stretch of two months alone, his biographer counted “two thousand seven hundred”. At Vadakkankulam it is believed he baptised around two hundred. These were the first Christians the village ever had, men, women and children brought to the water together. It was its founding harvest, and from it grew the great Christian community this place would one day be known for.

NoteThe parish's own accounts disagree about the year. Its 2026 history and the jubilee souvenir place the chapel and this first harvest in 1685; the Bishop's jubilee message of 2022 gives 1686; the parish's older English history puts the first church later still, at 1695. The district gazetteer of 1917 — the only witness from outside the parish — dates no chapel at all, and gives no number of baptisms. The heading therefore holds the two earliest readings together rather than choosing between them.

07 / 07

1693

A straw for a pen

Eight years after the thatch went up at Vadakkankulam, he was in irons. On the eve of his death, in the prison at Oriyur, he wrote to his brethren. A straw served him for a pen, and his ink was charcoal moistened with his own spittle. “The only crime I am accused of is, that of having taught the law of Jesus Christ… as this crime is a virtue, the punishment cannot be otherwise than honourable to me.” The next morning he was beheaded, forty-five years old, and two and a half centuries later Rome named him a saint. To the wider Church he is a martyr of the far south. To Vadakkankulam he has always been Arulanandar, the priest it remembers as its founder, whose feast it keeps each February.

02 / 06

1700

The priest and the queen

De Saa had not been long among them when the persecution fell. Men who were certain the priest was hiding money came for him one night while the fever was on him, dragged him from his bed, struck him, bound him with ropes and carried him before the Governor, who held him a while and then drove him out of the district. A fellow Jesuit, Fr Pierre Martin, came upon him months afterward still broken from it, and set down what he saw: “the traces of the beatings, and how all his teeth had been knocked out.” What brought him back was a word from a throne. Fr Laynez carried his case to Mangammal, the queen who then ruled Madurai, and she let him return to Vadakkankulam.

03 / 06

1709

The name in a Jesuit letter

By 1709 this place had its name in the letters the Jesuits sent home to Rome. The Annual Letter of that year puts Fr Maria Xavier Borghese at the head of the district of Vadakencoulam, and says of him: “He labours for the conversion of the heathen with an admirable zeal; the ardour of his spirit supplies for the strength of the body.” It is one line in a report, and it tells us nothing of the church or the village. But from here the record does not break again: the parish keeps its place in the written history of the mission from this year on.

04 / 06

1712–1713

Eight hundred in two seasons

The years that followed were the mission's spring. In two seasons, around 1712 and 1713, nearly eight hundred adults were baptised at Vadakkankulam, besides their children. By that year the church here counted at least four thousand one hundred and twenty-eight adults, with eighty-five more preparing for baptism that October. What had begun with two hundred under a roof of thatch was now one of the great Christian communities of the southern frontier.

05 / 06

1714

A house where a father lived

By 1714 the Society of Jesus had made Vadakkankulam a residence in its own right, no longer a village on a circuit but a house where a father lived. In the mission's own account of those years a missionary writes in the first person of an impostor who came “into the church of Vadakencoulam where I then was”, found out by the catechist walking at his side. A resident priest, a working church, a catechist beside him: within thirty years of the thatch, the parish had arrived.

06 / 06

Oct 1714

The vows of Veeramamunivar

That year permission came from Rome, and the Provincial named the priest who was to act on it: the father of this church. Constantine Beschi — the Italian Jesuit whom Tamil would come to know as Veeramamunivar, and whose Thembavani is counted among the classical poems of the language — was to make his profession of four vows, the last and gravest promise a Jesuit makes, and Fr Antonius Brandolini was to receive them, being “his neighbour in the district of Vadakenkulam.” On the feast of Saints Simon and Jude, the twenty-eighth of October 1714, the poet made his vows and the priest of Vadakkankulam received them. This village has said ever since that it was done here, and that Beschi brought his own catechist with him for the day. He was young in the mission then, and not yet the poet Tamil remembers. The annual letter written a few months later says he had given himself entirely to the study of Tamil poetry, and had gone further in it in the space of a few months than any missionary since the mission was founded — because in this country, it explains, nothing is held in higher esteem.

02 / 07

1745

There is no cause for delay

Neelakanta Pillai was already a man of standing when he came to the font: an officer at the court of the king of Travancore, of good family, and thirty-two years old. It was Eustache de Lannoy, an officer of the king's own army, who first spoke to him of the Christian faith and sent him on to Fr Buttari, the priest of Vadakkankulam. Buttari could see the persecution such a convert would draw, and he did not hurry. He “judged it necessary to defer the grace he so ardently desired; and, having tested him long, admitted him to the sacrament of regeneration.” A Protestant historian of Travancore records what the waiting man said to the hesitating priest: “There is no cause for delay. This is no compulsory baptism. I came here to receive the sacraments not by force, but by my own free will and desire. I shall even give up my life to maintain the Truth of which I received the light and of which I am convinced.” He would. The instruction ran nine months. On 14 May 1745 the water was poured in the church here, with the catechist Gnanaprakasam Pillai standing as his godfather, and the officer took the name Lazarus, and in Tamil Devasahayam, God is my help.

03 / 07

1749

From thatch to brick

By 1749 de Britto's thatch could no longer hold the congregation, and Fr Buttari set about a lasting church to replace it. He “laid the foundations” of it, and Fr Thomassini carried it to completion. By the parish's own record it rose in broad bricks, its foundation stone blessed at a kankol festival the parish dates to 1749.

04 / 07

c.1749

The errand for timber

Fr Buttari was “occupied in building his church”, and it wanted timber. To help his priest, Devasahayam went to an old friend at the king's court to ask leave to cut wood in the royal forests. They never got as far as the timber. They fell to arguing about religion instead, and the man went away threatening his life. The warrant followed soon after, and when it came, Devasahayam gave himself up without resistance.

05 / 07

1752

A church in the shape of a cross

By 1752 the church stood finished, raised in the form of a cross with its altar facing east toward the rising sun. Like de Britto's chapel before it, it was “dedicated to the Holy Family”. Its great feast was St Francis Xavier's, kept every December with a solemn novena. The parish fixes the year by two inscriptions once set inside the church's walls.

06 / 07

1752

The sweet names of Jesus and Mary

Three years of it: paraded through the towns on a buffalo, scourged, and chained for months to a tree in the wilderness. On 14 January 1752 they took him out to the Travancore lines at the Aralvaimozhi gap and shot him, and “the martyr expired, repeating the sweet names of Jesus and Mary”. His body was gathered into the church of St Francis Xavier at Kottar, where the Bishop of Cochin had the Te Deum sung and preached the martyr's panegyric himself. Vadakkankulam kept what it could of him: a part of his garment, and the chains he had been bound with. His wife, baptised Gnanapoo Theresa, lies in the parish cemetery, under a stone that gives the year of her death as 1766.

07 / 07

1773–1775

The last of the old fathers

In 1773 Pope Clement XIV suppressed the Society of Jesus in every country in the world. The Jesuits left in Tinnevelly, here and at Talai and Manapar, died one by one, and priests from Goa took their places. The last of the old fathers here was Clement Thomassini. Feeling his end near, he “had himself carried to Talai, to Fr Antoine Douarte”, and there he died in 1775, seventy-five years old. With him the first Jesuit century at Vadakkankulam closed.

02 / 10

after 1775

The father they would not let go

They never let go of Thomassini. In his lifetime he had won them by his gentleness, he had finished their church, and he was the last Jesuit they would have for sixty-three years. He had died away from the village and was buried elsewhere, but his own people “raised a monument in their midst” and kept his memory as a saint's. Ninety years after his death a Jesuit writing about this district still used the present tense: “The Christians venerate him as a saint, give his name to their children, and visit his tomb with an extreme devotion.” Even those who were not Christians, he added, called on him in their troubles, holding that his intercession brought the rain down on their harvests.

03 / 10

1803

A Friday forenoon in Aippasi

On the forenoon of Friday, 21 October 1803, in the Tamil month of Aippasi of the year 979, a man named Savarimuthu Pillai, who had come from Tirunelveli to see Mr Bilderbeck, a European settled in the village, went into the church to pray. The statue of Our Lady of the Assumption stood above the altar in a recess closed by a double door, and that morning both its leaves were open. As he knelt, a thin transparent cloud gathered behind her and wrapped her round. Her eyes lifted toward heaven and filled, and the tears ran down her cheeks; her face turned sorrowful; and her folded hands parted and stretched out until they touched the walls of the recess. And every other statue on the altar, the record says, “expressed compassion and mourning”. “I am the subject of an illusion,” he thought. He looked again, harder, and it had not stopped.

NoteThe two earliest printed accounts give this Friday as 21 October, and 21 October 1803 was a Friday; the feast is kept on the 22nd and 23rd.

04 / 10

1803

The bell at the wrong hour

The catechist Madurendira Annaviyar 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 came in from the fields and the houses to see why. They stood and looked, and then they wept and prayed, and sang the old penitential chant that is sung when a people is afraid: “Parce Domine, parce populo tuo.” Spare, O Lord, spare your people. And as they prayed, the statue and all the other images “resumed their customary aspect”, and the face above the altar was an ordinary carved face again.

05 / 10

1803

Her eyes like stars

To be sure of it, Savarimuthu went for the catechist Yagappar Pillai. The catechist came into the church and saw the Mother of God wrapped in smoke and darkness, her face desolate, her arms open, her eyes raised to heaven and running with tears. Then they sent in haste for Mr Bilderbeck's daughter, Henriette, and the girl ran to the church and saw it in her turn. Looking into Our Lady's face, she saw her eyes “like stars”, and the tears breaking from them so abundantly that “they ran to the ground and wetted it”; and the statues of the saints, all of them together, bowing their heads in sorrow.

06 / 10

1803

The schoolmaster's song

The first account of that morning was not written by a priest, and it was not written in prose. It was a song. The village schoolmaster made it immediately after, five stanzas of verse, and he had been in the church and seen the whole of it with his own eyes. He was a worshipper of Siva. Everything printed since has been built on what he composed that day: the hour before noon, the open doors of the niche, the cloud that gathered behind her, the tears, the hands reaching out until they touched the walls. When a Jesuit set the account down in print a century later, he chose to give “the substance of the song and its commentary, leaving aside the poetry and the rhythm”. The story survives. The verse of it did not.

07 / 10

1803–1817

The family in the church that morning

The Bilderbecks were flesh and blood, and they can be named. Christopher Bilderbeck, born about 1758, was a merchant of European descent who settled at Vadakkankulam late in the eighteenth century and died here in 1817. They were people of standing, holding the revenue-farm of Nangunery; and Henriette, who had examined the statue that morning, was his daughter. A son, John, was born in 1809, six years after the weeping; and when John died in 1880 an English missionary journal recorded of him that he had been “born in India… of a Roman Catholic family, and trained for the priesthood of that Church.” The family that stood in this church that morning left a paper trail of its own, in Protestant hands, kept by people with no reason at all to flatter a Catholic shrine.

08 / 10

1838

Those who could still be asked

When the Jesuits came back in 1838, that morning was still inside living memory. Thirty-five years lay between the fathers who arrived and the day itself, and many of the people who had been in the church were still alive to be asked. The first of them to reach Vadakkankulam found themselves, as a Jesuit of this mission afterwards wrote, “as if wrapped and steeped in the powerful atmosphere of that tradition”; they had only to listen to what the village willingly told them to learn the whole of it, and they became in their turn its witnesses. And there was one thing the village always put in, which no one who ever told the story left out: how the church had filled and the many candles of the altar were lit and everyone was on their knees, and how someone went up to wipe the tears and could not stop them or make them less. That helpless kindness was what broke the people. They beat their breasts, they said “Lord, have mercy on us,” and they sang the Salve Regina.

09 / 10

1905

He tried to move her hands

A hundred years after that morning a Jesuit of this mission came to see for himself. The village had made a working copy of the statue: wires and rods inside a hollow imitation, so that one pull raised the head, lifted the eyes to heaven, parted the hands and opened the arms, and a second pull put everything back again. “They kindly re-did the miracle for us,” he wrote. It did not go smoothly, and the man working it tangled his strings more than once. Then he went to the statue itself, standing alone in its place of honour above the tabernacle, and put his own hands on it. He tried to straighten the head, to lift the eyelids, to roll the eyes, and above all to separate those two hands carved from a single piece and force the rigid arms apart. Wasted labour. It was the dead resistance of raw matter, of a dried tree-trunk. He gave up what he called his usurped office of inquisitor of the Faith, and he gave it up gladly, and knelt.

10 / 10

1914

Three witnesses, in three hands

For a long time it was thought the whole of that morning came down a single line: Léon Besse's La Mission du Maduré, printed at Trichinopoly in 1914, which gathered up the papers of the Madurai mission and set the parish's record of 1803 into print. It does not. Nine years before Besse, a Jesuit of this mission, Fr Dessal, had already printed the account in full; and in 1930 a life of Devasahayam, written in Malayalam and in another tradition entirely, recorded the same European woman examining the same three signs. Three witnesses, in three hands, none of them copying the others. It was never carried to Rome, and no commission has ever weighed it. But it reaches us the way this village has always carried it: a dated morning, named witnesses, and two hundred and twenty years of keeping the feast.

NoteThe weeping has never been submitted to Rome, and no Vatican commission has examined it. It reaches us in three independent printed accounts, the earliest from 1905, and it claims no more than a dated morning, named witnesses, and an unbroken feast.

02 / 12

1839

On horseback at half past two

In 1839 the superior of the whole Madurai mission stayed behind here while his bishop went down alone to the coast, so as to keep the village's great novena and the solemn feast of St Francis Xavier. Fr Joseph Bertrand rode the last stage in the dark. “The 23rd. On horseback at half past two; at eight o'clock, arrival at Vadakencoulam, mass and the opening of the novena and of the administration.” That Mass opened nine days of feast, and with them the year's round of confessions and communions for the whole congregation.

03 / 12

1848

What the Bishop asked for

Coming back into his mission from the Malabar coast in 1848, Bishop Alexis Canoz entered it by this village. In his own account of the year he set this place down as “Vadakencoulam, a great and good Christian community, of which I made the visitation.” He came on the 21st of June, and before he went he asked the people to begin putting money aside for a large new church. They were not a rich village. It took them seven years. Then he came back and blessed the stone.

NoteThe visit is in Bishop Canoz's own hand, but he says nothing of any church or any money. The day, the 21st of June, and the request that the people begin saving for a large new church come down through the parish's own history alone.

04 / 12

by 1855

A bishop, a village, and a childless house

The money came from three places. The bishop carried it longest: for eighteen years Canoz sent at least two thousand francs a year toward the building. The village raised its share out of its own pockets, a little at a time, through seven years. And one family gave in thanksgiving. Christopher Bilderbeck was the European merchant of the village, and he and his wife had been married twenty-seven years without a child; he was past fifty by then, which is the age at which a man stops asking. They asked anyway. They prayed to Our Lady of this church, and before the year was out a son was born to them. Over all of it stood the parish priest: it is to Fr Joseph Grégoire's “persevering energy”, wrote the mission's own chronicler, that “this fine Christian community owes its great church.”

05 / 12

1855

Templum sit duplex, ara sed una

Fr Grégoire got the plan accepted in 1854, and it was not easily done. On 9 August 1855 the bishop came and blessed the foundation stone of the church that stands today. One of the priests made a motto for the design, and it is the whole building in four words: “Templum sit duplex, ara sed una.” Let the temple be twofold, but the altar one — and that one altar for all. Two naves would open apart at their doors and lean toward each other down their length until they met, and where they met there would be one sanctuary and one altar, for everyone who came in at either door.

06 / 12

1855–1872

Twenty-four arches, and no iron in them

It took seventeen years. The work was driven by Fr Joseph Grégoire, whom his chronicler calls the apostle of Vadakenkoulam, and the building was engineered by a Jesuit lay-brother named Joseph Bergenthal, whose office the Society's Roman register for 1872 gives in two words: Ædif. eccl., builder of the church. Between them they turned twenty-four arches that carry their own weight, in lime and palm-toddy mortar, without cement, without iron, and without one wooden beam holding anything up. Halfway through, in 1861, the bishop came again, and three thousand Christians were waiting for him on the road.

07 / 12

1861

Two bells out of France

The bells were cast at Valence in 1861, by the foundry of the widow Grégoire, and the man who paid for them put his name in the bronze: Casimir Grégoire. Fr Joseph Grégoire, who was building the church while they were being made, had been born at Valence himself — donor, founder and priest, one name and one town. They did not ring here for another eleven years. The crates came by sea and got as far as the District Collector's office at Tirunelveli, and there they stayed. What moved them in the end was the metal itself: someone looked at the bells and saw the cross cast into them, and Our Lady with the Child in her arms, and knew they belonged in a Catholic church, and said so to the Collector. In 1872 they were hung at last, one in each of the two towers. People here still say that when the two ring together there is a sweetness in the sound that is heard nowhere else in this country.

08 / 12

1863

What it cost, written in stone

What the seventeen years cost is written beside the church. “The piety of the Christians of Vadakenkoulam raised, near their church, a modest tomb to Fr Eugène Rossignol, who died on 25 January 1863.” He had caught the cholera nursing the Christians of Callikoulam. He was not the last to be laid there. Fr Victor Delpech came back to this village at the end, and the fevers took him, and he died in the arms of Fr Pouget; his stone gives the day, 16 January 1887, and the year of his birth, 1835. Fr Remigius Fernandez followed him in 1899, at seventy-eight. The stones are still legible, and the Latin at the foot of Delpech's says who set them there: his brethren raised this tomb, and the ones around it.

09 / 12

c.1864

A government clerk remembered them

In the mission's returns for about 1864 a British district manual counted three convents in the whole Jesuit mission of Tinnevelly: one at Tuticorin, one at Adeikalapuram, and “A Convent for Native Nuns at Vadakankulam.” It was the only one away from the fishery coast. There were seventeen Indian sisters in the whole mission and twelve European ones, and a house of the Indian sisters stood here, inland, while the great church was still a building site. They were not yet an order: the mission had been gathering Indian women into religious life since 1859, but did not constitute them as a congregation until 1876, so the sisters in this village belonged to those patient years before there was a rule to profess. No parish paper remembers them. A government clerk did.

10 / 12

1872

An open compass, closing on one altar

In 1872 it was finished. The district gazetteer sets the building down without ornament: “two converging naves which meet in a common chancel.” Auguste Jean saw it as an open compass, two arms splayed at the doors, drawing nearer down the length of the building, closing at last on one shared sanctuary. A German visitor put it more simply still: a double church, with one common high altar — in its way a masterpiece of architecture, he thought, bearing brilliant witness to the talent of “our Br Bergenthal”. Over it stand two octagonal towers of ninety-two feet, and inside, the vaults were painted in dyes drawn from plants and trees.

11 / 12

1872

The two days in June

On the 27th of June the bishop arrived, and the village received him at the little church of St Aloysius. Br Bergenthal was there too: the man who had drawn the plan and stood over the work came to see it blessed. The blessing was at five that evening. Then they kept the bishop's own silver jubilee, for it was twenty-five years since his consecration. And on the 29th, the feast of the Holy Apostles, Canoz sang the Pontifical Mass in the new church and declared it dedicated to the Holy Family.

12 / 12

1873

The Red Sea

“What the building of this sanctuary cost him in cares and fatigues, God alone knows,” wrote his chronicler — and a sharper pain came to him afterwards. On the very day the people took possession of their new church, the congregation broke apart. The quarrel went to law, and Fr Grégoire, who had given seventeen years to the building, was obliged to stand up in court and give evidence against a part of his own flock. It made him lose his eating and his sleeping. His strength never came back, and they sent him home to France to see whether it would. Fr Victor Delpech went with him. The ship had just entered the Red Sea when the delirium declared itself; at six the next morning he opened his eyes and could not speak. Delpech anointed him, and about two in the afternoon he gave his soul back to God, after thirty years a missionary. Seventeen of them had gone into this church. It has stood now a century and a half.

NoteAuguste Jean says he accepted his superiors' invitation to spend a few months at home; Dessal says he sailed on his doctors' advice.

02 / 08

1891

Over the hills, behind her

Every year in August this village sets Our Lady on a car and takes her through its streets, and every year people come over the hills from Kerala to walk behind her. They were doing it long before anyone now living can remember. A church historian of Travancore, writing in 1903 about a feast kept here generations earlier, set it down as ordinary settled custom: the Assumption festival at this church, “where several inhabitants of Malabar are accustomed to go annually”. He was not a Catholic and had no reason to flatter the place. In 1891 the village built the car itself — a ther thirty-five feet high, carved by local sculptors out of jackfruit, teak and neem. It carried her through these streets for more than a hundred years, and rests now as the cradle of the Pilgrims' Mother; a newly designed ther has taken its road since 2014. The procession still goes out in the small hours of 15 August, and something close to a hundred thousand people walk with it.

03 / 08

c.1910

The wall inside the church

For a generation a partition ran down the inside of the church Fr Grégoire had built, dividing one nave from the other. About 1910 Fr Adrien Caussanel had it pulled down. When the government's gazetteer of Tinnevelly wanted the truth about this parish, it went to him and printed what he told it. In the government office the priest was reputed to mock at Authority, and the district Collector rode out, as he put it, to track “the dragon” to his lair. He found a man so thin he had never seen the like: for eighteen years, Caussanel told him, he had eaten no solid food, only milk and gruel, and there was no piety in it: it was the one way he could master his dyspepsia. He knew drugs and simples, and was doctor to that village as much as priest. A furious quarrel was running between him and a good part of his congregation, and the Collector noticed that he served them anyway: “his affection for his wayward sheep seemed unaffected by their waywardness.” When he died in 1930 his own Society's necrology said it without hedging: for nearly forty years, “the great missionary, the saint of the mission.” What the motto on the foundation stone had promised in 1855, the building was finally allowed to be: twofold, and one.

04 / 08

c.1905–1920

The priest who sat up with the old papers

Some time about 1905 a Frenchman came to this parish and stayed the better part of fifteen years. What he did with his evenings the Jesuits' own magazine records without ceremony: Fr Adrien Caussanel wrote “diaries, a history of the country”, and he “searches out the old manuscripts and deciphers them”. Somewhere in this village lay older papers: registers, letters, whatever two centuries of priests had left behind. He sat down with them, night after night, and worked out what they said. He was the parish priest of an inland village a long way from anywhere, and he spent the hours he had left gathering up its past, so that the people among whom he lived would not lose it. The book he made out of those papers outlived him, and is kept in the Society's archive still.

05 / 08

1923

Filed among the fishing villages

In 1923 the Diocese of Tuticorin was erected, and Vadakkankulam passed out of the old Diocese of Trichinopoly into the new see. Its first bishop was Francis Tiburtius Roche: a Jesuit, and, as Stephen Neill records, the first Indian bishop of the Latin rite. The Catholic Directory of the following year prints a diocese still being drawn: “The Limits of this new Diocese are not yet quite determined. — It is impossible to give at present the number of Parishes that compose it.” Inside it there is as yet only one district, the Fishery Coast, and this inland parish is filed among the fishing villages: “Vadakankulam (Tinnevelly Dt.) — Revv. Y. Ignatius, G. Michael, Asst. — Cath. 4,765, vills. 17: Churches: brick 1, clay 4.” Neither priest was a Jesuit. After more than two centuries, the care of this parish had passed to the diocesan clergy, in the very year its new bishop was himself a Jesuit.

06 / 08

1926

Chinna Romapuri

Vadakkankulam has a second name: Chinna Romapuri — Little Rome. The village remembers it being given in 1926 by Bishop Roche, the first bishop of Tuticorin, for the church he had come to see; and the parish says what he meant was the design. The souvenir puts it plainly: this building was raised after the manner of the great basilica of Rome, and outside Rome there is nothing else like it. The claim is less extravagant than it sounds. Thirty years before anyone called this place Little Rome, the mission's own historian had already written that seventeen years of Fr Grégoire's labour had given Vadakkankulam “a church probably without equal in the world”. And the name was never only about the building. A government gazetteer, setting the village down with no interest whatever in flattering it, records that after Kamanayakkanpatti this was “the second centre of advance of the ancient Madura mission into Tinnevelly”, and that “in course of time it became the chief centre of the mission in this district.” For the better part of a century the inland mission was run from here. Little Rome was not a compliment paid to a village; it was a description of what the village had been. It has been Little Rome ever since: on the lips of pilgrims, on the boards at the roadside, and in the way people from the next district still tell you where they are going.

07 / 08

1930

The bell heard in the wood

In Rome, Bishop Roche laid his people's homage before Pope Pius XI, and the Pope sent mementoes back for the most deserving Christians of Tuticorin. One of them went to the old sacristan of Vadakenkoulam, brother to a vicar general and to the superior of a convent, and still, at eighty-two, keeping the sacristy of this church. He was given the Bene Merenti medal. The Jesuits' magazine printed his years and his office, and forgot to print his name. It need not have troubled: the office was older than the man. Forty years before, a visitor had been told that the sacristanship here had been held in one family for two hundred years, and had been given the reason. A man and his wife, on pilgrimage to a pagoda, lost their road in a wood full of tigers. Night came down on them; they called on their gods, and nothing answered; and then, a long way off, they heard a bell. They went towards it and came to the door of a hut, where an old man set rice and bananas before them and gave them a bed for the night. In the morning they asked him the way on to the pagoda. He raised his eyes to Heaven, made the sign of the Cross, and began instead to speak to them of the God they had never heard of, and he spoke so well that they went no further. In a short time they were the most fervent Christians in the village. The husband was made sacristan of this church, and thought it no small privilege to ring the bell that had been the means of his own salvation. “The descendants of these good pilgrims are many in number,” the visitor wrote; “I have known several of them who are exemplary priests.”

08 / 08

1944

Fatima Giri

The Rosarians, the first contemplative order of men founded in Asia, were begun at Jaffna in 1928 by Fr B. A. Thomas, and came to Vadakkankulam on 13 February 1944. Antony Susainather, whom the order honours as a Servant of God, had bought four acres with the diocese's help and raised a small chapel and living quarters on it; and on the day the monks arrived, Bishop Roche came out and blessed the place: the same bishop who, eighteen years before, had called this village Little Rome. It was the first Rosarian house on Indian soil. The Fathers keep it still, and with the Servite and the Bethany Sisters they belong to the ordinary week of the parish.

02 / 03

c.1922

Lace, thread and the needle

An inspector came to the sisters' needlework school in 1921. From 1922 they were teaching needlework, embroidery, lace, knitting and dress-making, and in 1966 the tailoring school passed wholly into their charge. The R.C. Lace Industrial School and the Osanam Sewing Institute are counted among the works of this parish to this day. They were the second rung of the ladder the village built for its daughters: letters first, then a trade in the fingers, and a wage that did not depend on the rain.

03 / 03

1970

Faith, letters, and no doctor

Fr Maria Gnanam, then parish priest, saw that his people had faith and letters and no doctor, and he wrote to the Sisters of the Little Flower of Bethany. Four sisters arrived on 27 July 1970 and began their healing ministry in a rented house. With help from Misereor they built St Thomas Hospital where it stands today — forty beds and an operating theatre, serving twenty-five to thirty villages around. They keep it still.

02 / 06

2014

A new chariot takes the road

In 2014 the parish had a new festival chariot of the Assumption designed and built, and the car the village had carved in 1891 came off the road after a hundred and twenty-three years of processions. In those same years the Calvary chapel of the Apparition shrine was completed, and statues were set up of St Devasahayam and St Arulanandar — the man who was baptised here, and the man who founded the place.

03 / 06

2021

The kodimaram

On 6 August 2021 Bishop Stephen Antony consecrated the flag-mast, the kodimaram, set up under the parish priest Fr John Britto. It was the opening day of the ten-day Perunkoor feast that runs to the Assumption on the fifteenth — and the same day of the year on which this church had been declared a shrine, twenty-eight years before.

04 / 06

2022

The turban and the chains

On 15 May 2022 Pope Francis canonised Devasahayam Pillai, baptised in this church on 14 May 1745 — the first Indian layman ever raised to the altars. What this church holds of him, it has held a long time. At Christmas 1888 a visiting priest wrote that the most precious memory of his day here was the martyr: “Vadakenkoulam possesses the turban he wore, and the chains taken off at his death.” Fr Pouget opened the reliquary and let them look. That head-cloth, worn by an officer of the Travancore court, is kept here still, and every 15 August it is set out in a glass case for the pilgrims to venerate.

05 / 06

2012–2025

Patron of the laity

It neither began nor ended in 2022. Benedict XVI recognised the martyrdom in June 2012, and that 2 December Cardinal Angelo Amato beatified him in the Pope's name at Nagercoil. Pope Francis recognised the miracle in February 2020 and canonised him in May 2022. Then, by a decree of 16 July 2025 proclaimed on 15 October, Rome named him Patron of the Laity in India. The man who was baptised at this font is patron now of every lay Catholic in the country.

06 / 06

present day

Little Rome today

Vadakkankulam is an overwhelmingly Catholic town, and a remarkably literate one: the census counts 9,220 people, ninety-four in every hundred of them able to read. The parish reckons some 10,500 Catholics in about 4,000 families, organised through Basic Christian Communities. The great August Perunkoor feast still draws close to a lakh of pilgrims for the chariot procession in the small hours of the fifteenth, many of them crossing over from Kerala; and through the rest of the year the parish keeps its people close by its magazine, Vadavai Matha Malar, and its own live broadcasts. The bells, when they ring together, still sound the way people here have always said they sound.

NoteThe head-count is the parish's own. The diocese's roll gives a smaller figure: about 7,350 Catholics in some 1,600 families.