The Parish Register
The Fathers of Vadavai
Sixty-nine pastorates since 1697. Not one year of them without a priest.
This parish has numbered its priests since 1697, and the list now runs to sixty-nine — a few of them the second and third terms of the same man. It has kept the name of every one. For about fifteen the Jesuit archives in Rome, the French mission histories and the parish's own diaries preserve a life: what he built, what he refused, how he died. For the rest, what survives is the two things that mattered to the village — his name, and the years he stayed.
The list below is the parish's own, numbered 1 to 69 and divided into the five periods it uses itself. Where the sources disagree — and over three hundred and twenty-eight years they disagree often, about the first priest's name, about the year a pastor died at sea — both readings are given rather than one chosen. The rule under each set of years is the length of that pastorate: a dash for a single year, the full stroke for Fr Thomassini's twenty-four.
Period I
The Old Madurai Mission
1697 – 1775Jesuits of the old Madurai Mission, sent out through Goa and Cochin. They took Tamil names and the village used them: a priest here was not Buttari but Paranchodinadhar, not Thomassini but Madurendranadher. Those are the names in the parish's own list, and they are given here beside the European ones.
- 1பென்னாட் டி சூசா
Fr Bernard de Saa
பென்னாட் டி சூசா
Bennet de Souza · Fr Ponnaiya
The list opens with him, and it opens unsteadily. The parish's history names him Bernard de Saa and dates him from 1697; the 150th-anniversary souvenir writes Bennet de Souza and dates him from 1698; and the souvenir's own prose says that “in the year 1698, Rev. Fr. Ponnaiya took charge… the first parish priest of Vadavai”. Three names, two start years, one man — or perhaps two. It is published as it stands, because the alternative is to choose one and sound certain.
1697 – 1699
- 2
Fr Maria Xavier Borghese
மரிய போர்க்கிஸ்
Borges
1700 – 1704
- 3
Fr Peter Martin
பீட்டர் மார்ட்டின்
Pedro Samiar
1705 – 1707
- 4
Fr Simon Carvalho
சைமன் கார்வெல்கோ
He founded the mission station at Nemom, into which this church was incorporated in 1713.
1708
- 5
Fr Maria Xavier Borghese
போர்க்கிஸ்
His second term carries the earliest printed mention of this parish anywhere: in 1709, writes Auguste Jean, Borghese was “put in charge of the Christians of Vadakenkoulam, near Cape Comorin”.
1709 – 1710
- 6
Fr Louis Novel
ஹம்போ நோவேல்
1711 – 1712
- 7
Fr Ignatius Cardoza
இக்னேசியஸ் கர்டோசா
1712
- 8
Fr Bursus
பூர்சு
Bourse
1713
- 9
Fr Bernardiza
பென்னாடிசா
1714
- 10
Fr Antonius Brandolini
அந்தோனிநாதர்
Antoninadher
1715
- 11
Fr Alexander
அல்லக்சாண்டர்
1716
- 12
Fr Dominicus Madeyara
டொமினிக்ஸ் மடேயரா
Madeira
1717 – 1727
- 13
Fr Giliya
கிலியா
Gilia
1728
- 14பாக்கியநாதர்
Fr Thomas Prosper Giuliani
பாக்கியநாதர்
Pakkianadher · Paulastamer
A Saivite poosari of Vittapuram, Chidambaram Pillai, was walking to Cape Comorin with his wife Aantavalli when he heard this church's bell. He stopped for the Mass, stayed for instruction, and was baptised Gnanapragasam — spiritual light. Fr Giuliani made him catechist of the village and built him a house. Twelve years later Gnanapragasam stood godfather at the baptism of St Devasahayam Pillai.
1729 – 1733
- 15
Fr Joseph Silverio
ஜோசப் சில்வேரியா
1734 – 1740
- 16பரஞ்சோதிநாதர்
Fr John Baptist Buttari, S.J.
பரஞ்சோதிநாதர்
Paranchodinadhar · Jean-Baptiste Bouttari
On 14 May 1745 he baptised Neelakanta Pillai, a captain of the Travancore army, by the name Devasahayam — the man the Church canonised in 2022 as the first Indian layman to be declared a saint. In 1749 he began the first stone church, and it was the timber for that building that undid his convert: sent to cut wood in the royal forest, Devasahayam fell into the dispute that ended in his arrest. This church still keeps a piece of his garment and the chains he was bound with. Buttari was moved on to Aoor as the missionary best able to heal that congregation's ills; at Vadakkankulam, Auguste Jean writes, “his memory is held in benediction”.
1741 – 1750
- 17மதுரேந்திரநாதர்
Fr Francis Clemente Thomassini, S.J.
மதுரேந்திரநாதர்
Madurendranadher · Gnana Amourdam · Clément Tomassini
He finished the church Buttari had begun — built in the form of a cross, facing east — and he was the last Jesuit to hold this parish before Rome suppressed the Society of Jesus in 1773. Feeling his end near, he had himself carried to Taley, and died there in 1775, aged seventy-five. Bertrand records what followed: the Christians venerated him as a saint, gave his name to their children and visited his tomb, and in times of drought even the village's Hindus would call on him.
1751 – 1775
Period II
The Priests of Cochin
1776 – 1835The Society of Jesus had been suppressed by the Pope in 1773. Fr Thomassini died two years later and there was no Jesuit left to send, so the parish passed to the Malabar priests under the Archbishop of Cranganore. Sixty years, eight priests — and, in the middle of them, the year the parish has commemorated ever since.
- 18
Fr Deva Varadhanar
தேவ வரதனார்
1776 – 1791
- 19
Fr Ignatius
இக்னேசியஸ்
1792 – 1802
- 20ஜாண் லூயிஸ் கர்டோசா
Fr John Louis Cardoza
ஜாண் லூயிஸ் கர்டோசா
His name occupies a single year of this list, and it is the year. On 23 October 1803 the statue of Our Lady in this church was seen to weep. Fr Cardoza — with a second priest and a European laywoman who examined the statue herself — declared it an extraordinary event, which is why this parish can still name the priest who authenticated its devotion. The souvenir's occasional “1805” is a copying slip: the list shows him parish priest in 1803 and in no other year, between Fr Ignatius and Fr de Miranda.
1803
- 21
Fr Francis de Miranda
பிரான்சிஸ் டி பிரான்டா
1804 – 1808
- 22
Fr Xavier Gestand
சேவியர் ஜிஸ்மண்டு
Sigismund
1809 – 1826
- 23
Fr Jacob Puthampare
ஜேக்கப் பத்தாம் பேரே
1827 – 1831
- 24
Fr Michael Fierras
மிக்கேல் பிரான்
Brun
1832 – 1835
Period III
The Pondicherry Mission
1836 – 1837Two years and one priest, while the southern missions were being reassigned. The shortest period on the list, and the only one with a single name in it.
- 25
Fr Thairiyanadhar
தைரியநாதர்
Fr Dayriam · Dhairyanathar
1836 – 1837
Period IV
The New Jesuits of Toulouse
1838 – 1910The Society was restored in 1814, and from 1838 the French province of Toulouse took up the Madurai mission again. Almost everything a visitor sees today was built in this period: the present church, its two towers, its bells and its arches.
- 26
Fr Alex Martin
அலக்சாண்டர் மார்ட்டின்
1838
- 27
Fr Louis Duranguet
ஹம்போ தூராஸ்தெவில
1839 – 1840
- 28
Fr Antonius Sales
அன்ரோனின் சேவல்
1841
- 29
Fr Constantine
Castanier, in the souvenir
1842 – 1843
- 30
Fr Joseph Grégoire, S.J.
ஜோசப் கிரகோரி
The first of his three terms here. He would come back twice, and altogether give this village thirty years.
1844
- 31
Dessal, Le Père Louis Verdier, 1902 Fr Louis Verdier, S.J.
ஞானப்பிரகாசியார்
Gnanapragasiar souvami · pangou-souvami
Vadakkankulam was his first appointment in India — 1 December 1847 — and the village named him Gnanapragasiar, “spiritual light”, which is the Tamil for Louis. At Anakarei, the other half of his parish, the old Jesuit church was falling down, so he asked every parishioner, “men and women, great and small, young people and old folk”, to carry twenty-four stones to the site before or after the sacraments. In a month and a half he had heard a thousand confessions and twenty-four thousand stones had arrived. He rose to Vicar General of the whole Madurai mission.
1847 – 1850
- 32
Fr Hieronymus Maza
ஜெரோம் மெஸ்
Jérôme Mazza
1851 – 1852
- 33ஜோசப் கிரகோரி
Fr Joseph Grégoire, S.J.
ஜோசப் கிரகோரி
Auguste Jean calls him, simply, the apostle of Vadakkankulam: “it is chiefly to his persevering energy that this fine Christian community owes its great church.” Bishop Canoz blessed the foundation stone on 9 August 1855, and for seventeen years Grégoire drove the building of it, with the Westphalian lay brother Joseph Bergenthal as his architect. What they finished in 1872 was, in Auguste Jean's phrase, “a church probably without equal in the world”. Sent home to France for his health, he never arrived: he died in the crossing of the Red Sea and was buried at sea — in 1875 by Dessal's account, 1873 by Auguste Jean's, a disagreement neither book resolves.
1853 – 1861
- 34
Fr Clément Castanier, S.J.
காஸ்டானியர்
1862 – 1865
- 35
Fr Joseph Grégoire, S.J.
ஜோசப் கிரகோரி
His third and last term as parish priest. He stayed on in the village for years after it ended, and was still here when the church was blessed in 1872.
1866 – 1870
- 36
Fr Guillielmus Pouget, S.J.
William Pouget
1870 – 1873
- 37
Fr William Paget
வில்லியம் பேஜெட்
1873 – 1874
- 38
Fr Ficiuos Babos
பிரட்ரிக்கா போஸ்
1875
- 39
Suau, L'Inde tamoule, 1899 Fr Victor Delpech, S.J.
விக்டர் டெல்ப்ளீ
He preached with statues and marionettes worked by hidden springs, and he had been Fr Grégoire's travelling companion on the voyage where Grégoire died. Acting parish priest in 1876, he then served this church eleven years as assistant, and he died in it — “in the arms of Fr Pouget, at Vadakenkoulam, on a Saturday, the eve of the feast of the most holy Name of Jesus”, 16 January 1887. He is buried behind the church. A survey of European tombs made in 1894 read his stone: “1887, 16th January. Victor Delpech S.J., aged 52 years.”
1876
- 40
Fr Joseph Faseuille, S.J.
ஜோசப் பெல்லஸ்வில்லே
The Rome catalogue of 1880 has him here as minister and superior. He later became Vicar General of the mission.
1877 – 1882
- 41
Fr Guillielmus Pouget, S.J.
வில்லியம் புக்கே
1882 – 1893
- 42
Fr Joseph Faseuille, S.J.
ஜோசப் சாங் பால்க்வில்லே
1894 – 1895
- 43
Fr Adaikalam
அடைக்கலம்
1895 – 1896
- 44
Fr Peter Brien
பீட்டர் புரண்ட் இன்போடாரியம்
1896 – 1897
- 45
Fr Gabriel Berthien
கபிரியேல் பெர்திஞ்
Bertin
1897 – 1898
- 46
Fr Chinnappar
சின்னப்பர்
1899
- 47
Fr Marianus Dayriam, S.J.
தைரியநாதர்
Parish priest, chaplain to the convent of the native Sisters of the Seven Sorrows, and director of the schools — the three offices every late-Jesuit pastor of this village held at once.
1899 – 1910
Period V
The Modern Era
1910 – todayThe parish's own list opens its last period in 1910, but the change it marks came in 1923: the Diocese of Tuticorin was erected and the church passed from the Society of Jesus to the diocesan clergy. That is why, from Fr Ignatius onward, every name here is Tamil — and why the last twelve pastors are the first whose faces the parish still has.
- 48கௌசானல்
Fr Adrien Caussanel, S.J.
Causonnel · Caussonnel
His own Jesuit obituary says of this pastorate only that at Vadakenkoulam “he sustained long struggles”. He took down the partitions that divided the inside of the 1872 church, so that the whole parish stood in one nave and sang together, and he held to it in the face of determined opposition — the case went to the District Court in 1913 and on to the Madras High Court, which decided it in 1926. A visitor who met him here wrote that he had never seen a man so thin: for eighteen years Fr Caussanel had taken no solid food, living on milk and bananas. He founded the Brothers of the Sacred Heart at Palamcottah in 1902, and died at Kallikulam on 25 January 1930.
1910 – 1919
- 49
Fr Ponor
போனோசர்
Alfred Bonhoure, S.J.
1919 – 1923
- 50
Fr Y. Ignatius
இன்னாசியார்
The first diocesan priest on this list. The Catholic Directory of India for 1924 finds him here with an assistant, 4,765 Catholics and seventeen villages — one church of brick and four of clay.
1924 – 1936
- 51
Fr Mariadas
மரியதாஸ்
1936 – 1943
- 52
Fr Joachim Fernando
சுவக்கின்
1943 – 1950
- 53
Fr Benedict
1950 – 1954
- 54
Fr Navamani
அமல ஆதி நவமணி
1954 – 1960
- 55
Fr Maria Ganam
மரியதாசர்
1960 – 1974
- 56
Fr M. S. Antony
அந்தோனியார்
1974 – 1982
- 57
Fr Peter Raja
The earliest parish priest of this church whose photograph the parish still holds.
1982 – 1985
- 58
Fr Cruz Marian
குருசுமரியன்
1985 – 1988
- 59
Fr Job De Rose
Joseph De Rose
Twice parish priest of this church; he was sent back in 1997. The souvenir left his portrait roundel blank.
1988 – 1990
- 60
Fr Irudayaraj
இருதயராஜ்
1990 – 1995
- 61
Rev. Msgr S. Mariadas
மரியதாஸ்
A Monsignor — the only one on this list.
1995 – 1997
- 62
Fr Job De Rose
His second term.
1997 – 1998
- 63
Fr Theophilus
தியோபிலஸ்
He had served this church as assistant priest in 1984, fourteen years before he came back to hold it.
1998 – 2003
- 64
Fr N. A. Panneerselvam
2003 – 2008
- 65
Fr Nelson Paul Raj
நெல்சன் பால்ராஜ்
2008 – 2013
- 66
150th-anniversary souvenir, 2022 Fr Thaddeus Rajan
தடேயுஸ் ராஜன்
He completed the Calvary chapel of the apparition church, set up in it the statues of St Devasahayam and St Arulanandar, and began the First-Saturday devotion that the parish keeps still. In 2014 he had the festival chariot that carries Our Lady through the village newly designed and built.
2013 – 2018
- 67
Fr T. John Britto
ஜான் பிரிட்டோ
The parish flagstaff was raised in his time, and consecrated by Bishop A. Stephen on 6 August 2021.
2018 – 2023
- 68
Fr Martin Manuvel
2023 – 2025
- 69
Fr A. Joseph Christian
The sixty-ninth priest of this parish, and the one who has it now.
2025 – today
Names the archives add
The parish counted its own priests and the Jesuits in Rome kept their own registers, and the two do not quite agree. Four men are documented at Vadakkankulam by sources outside the parish and appear on no line of the list above. They are set down here rather than quietly slotted in.
- Fr Calini, S.J.1716
- Quoted in the 1917 Tinnevelly Gazetteer as “stationed at Vadakkankulam, which had two years previously become a residence” — which independently dates the founding of the Jesuit residence here to about 1714.
- Fr Massour, S.J.about 1775
- Bertrand's Lettres du Maduré names him third, after Buttari and Thomassini, “about the same time”. His dates are unrecorded; he belongs somewhere in the handover to the priests of Cochin.
- Br Joseph Bergenthal, S.J.1855 – 1872
- The lay brother who drew and built the present church. The Rome catalogue for 1872 lists him at this station with the title Ædif. eccl. — builder of the church — and the parish's own English history calls him four times its chief architect. He appears on no other website in any language.
- Fr Eugène Rossignol, S.J.died here, 1863
- Not a pastor of this parish but of the mission around it. He caught the cholera that killed him while caring for the Christians of Kallikulam, and died here on 25 January 1863, aged forty. He is buried behind the church.
The bishops who acted here
Four bishops did something at this church that the parish still lives inside — a foundation stone, a name, a decree, a flagstaff.
Bishop Alexis Canoz, S.J.
First Bishop of Madurai
Visited on his first pastoral tour of the south in 1848, blessed the foundation stone of the present church on 9 August 1855, and blessed the finished church in 1872.
Most Rev. Dr Francis Tiburtius Roche, S.J.
First Bishop of Tuticorin
In 1926 he called Vadakkankulam “Little Rome” — Chinna Romapuri — and the name has stuck to the village for a century.
Most Rev. Dr S. T. Amalanathar
Bishop of Thoothukudi
Declared the Holy Family Church a Shrine on 6 August 1993.
Bishop A. Stephen
Bishop of Thoothukudi
Consecrated the parish flagstaff on 6 August 2021, twenty-eight years to the day after the shrine decree.
They are buried here
Six dated stones stand in a row behind the church, the earliest from 1863 and the latest from 2002 — a hundred and forty years of this parish's priests along one wall. Two of the inscriptions were read and printed in 1894, by a colonial survey of the European tombs of Tinnevelly, so those two can be quoted exactly.
Fr Eugène Rossignol, S.J.1863
“1863, 25th January. Eugene Rossignal S.J., Roman Catholic Missionary, aged 41 years.”
Fr Victor Delpech, S.J.1887
“1887, 16th January. Victor Delpech S.J., aged 52 years.”
Fr Remigius Fernandez, S.J.1899
An unnamed priest1874 – 1925
The stone is worn past reading. Only the two dates can still be made out.
Fr Dharmanathar1880 – 1950
Fr J. M. Nicholas1911 – 2002
A son of this village.
What is still missing
This register is not finished, and it is better to say where the holes are than to let the page imply there are none.
- Four faces. The parish holds a photograph of every priest since 1982 except Fr Job De Rose and Fr Irudayaraj — the souvenir printed their roundels blank — and has none yet of Fr Martin Manuvel or Fr Joseph Christian. Their families almost certainly have them.
- About a hundred assistant priests. The parish has the roster of every curate sent here since 1870, usually on his first posting. The only copy is a faintly printed souvenir page, and it cannot be read with enough confidence to publish a real man's name from it. It needs someone who knows these names to read it aloud against the scan.
- The priests and sisters this village gave. Fifteen priests and eighteen sisters, including the first Vicar General of the Diocese of Thoothukudi, who was a son of Vadakkankulam. Same problem, same fix.
If you can supply a photograph, correct a name or a date, or read one of those pages, please write to the parish. Corrections are welcome and will be credited.
69 pastorates, 5 periods, three hundred and twenty-eight years, and no gap in the line.