The Fathers of Vadavai

Jesuits 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.

1. 1
   பென்னாட் 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. Whoever he was, a letter of his own survives, dated 14 October 1713: villagers who believed he was hiding treasure seized him and knocked out every one of his teeth. A fellow Jesuit, Fr Peter Martin, who also held this same parish and stands at #3 on this list, saw the marks himself, and de Saa was freed only after another priest pleaded his case to Rani Mangammal, the reigning queen of Madurai, and he returned to the village.

   1697 – 1699

2. 2

   Fr Maria Xavier Borghese

   மரிய போர்க்கிஸ்

   Borges

   Bertrand's letters record him imprisoned forty days during this first term. It is the earliest documented hardship any priest of this parish is known to have suffered for it.

   1700 – 1704

3. 3

   Fr Peter Martin

   பீட்டர் மார்ட்டின்

   Pedro Samiar · Fr Pierre Martin, S.J.

   The same Fr Pierre Martin whose own letters, printed in the French Jesuits' Lettres édifiantes, are among the earliest sources on this mission, and who saw for himself the beating that cost Fr Bernard de Saa, also on this list, every one of his teeth.

   1705 – 1707

4. 4

   Fr Simon Carvalho

   சைமன் கார்வெல்கோ

   He founded the mission station at Nemom, into which this church was incorporated in 1713.

   1708

5. 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. 6

   Fr Louis Novel

   ஹம்போ நோவேல்

   Louis-Noël de Bourzès

   He held the title only on paper: his own letters admit he could not visit during his “nominal charge”, and Fr Bernard de Saa covered the work in his stead. What he did that year was write the mission's Annual Letters and begin the French–Tamil dictionaries that make Tamil scholars remember him still.

   1711 – 1712

7. 7

   Fr Ignatius Cardoza

   இக்னேசியஸ் கர்டோசா

   Fr Ignace Cordoso, S.J.

   Two years after this single year here, he gave the Spiritual Exercises to a hundred and sixty people at Ikkuti.

   1712

8. 8

   Fr Bursus

   பூர்சு

   Bourse

   1713

9. 9

   Fr Bernardiza

   பென்னாடிசா

   The parish's other own list reads this same year differently, as “Rev. Bernard (Bernardino)”, and a colleague's letter from that October has Fr Bernard de Saa “again presiding”. This may be his own third, unlisted return, not a separate man.

   1714

10. 10
    அந்தோனிநாதர்

    Fr Antonius Brandolini

    அந்தோனிநாதர்

    Antoninadher

    A first-person letter of his survives, written as resident of this village the year before he held it, and it is the earliest inside view of Vadakkankulam in the whole documentary record. It was to him, on 28 October 1714, that Constantine Beschi — Veeramamunivar — made his profession of four vows; the letter Beschi wrote about it names the day and names Brandolini, and gives no place at all. He was sent to Rome in 1720 to argue the Jesuits' case in the Malabar Rites controversy, where his own brother, a cardinal, lobbied on his behalf.

    1715

11. 11

    Fr Alexander

    அல்லக்சாண்டர்

    1716

12. 12

    Fr Dominicus Madeyara

    டொமினிக்ஸ் மடேயரா

    Madeira

    In 1726 or 1727 he ordered a younger missionary, Constantine Beschi, to write the Veda Vilakkam, a Tamil catechetical work still read today.

    1717 – 1727

13. 13

    Fr Giliya

    கிலியா

    Gilia · probably Fr G. B. Bigaglia, S.J.

    A Jesuit history of the Malabar mission places a Fr Bigaglia in this same post the same year, and has him rise to superior of the whole Madurai mission by 1739, training that year the young Fr Buttari who would one day baptise St Devasahayam here.

    1728

14. 14
    பாக்கியநாதர்

    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. Giuliani himself died in office, of blood poisoning, in January 1733.

    1729 – 1733

15. 15

    Fr Joseph Silverio

    ஜோசப் சில்வேரியா

    An outside history of the Jesuits in Malabar independently confirms his posting here, though it gives 1741 as his last year, one later than the parish's own count.

    1734 – 1740

16. 16
    பரஞ்சோதிநாதர்

    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. He is 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

17. 17
    மதுரேந்திரநாதர்

    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 and 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

The 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. For these sixty years it was the sole centre of the whole inland mission, with three smaller stations under it, and a government gazetteer records that its priests handed that charge to the newly arrived Jesuits in a single dated act, in 1837. Sixty years, seven priests, and in the middle of them the year the parish has commemorated ever since.

1. 18

   Fr Deva Varadhanar

   தேவ வரதனார்

   1776 – 1791

2. 19

   Fr Ignatius

   இக்னேசியஸ்

   1792 – 1802

3. 20
   ஜாண் லூயிஸ் கர்டோசா

   Fr John Louis Cardoza

   ஜாண் லூயிஸ் கர்டோசா

   His name occupies a single year of this list, and it is the year. On 21 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

4. 21

   Fr Francis de Miranda

   பிரான்சிஸ் டி பிரான்டா

   1804 – 1808

5. 22

   Fr Xavier Gestand

   சேவியர் ஜிஸ்மண்டு

   Sigismund

   1809 – 1826

6. 23

   Fr Jacob Puthampare

   ஜேக்கப் பத்தாம் பேரே

   1827 – 1831

7. 24

   Fr Michael Fierras

   மிக்கேல் பிரான்

   Brun

   1832 – 1835

Two 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.

1. 25

   Fr Thairiyanadhar

   தைரியநாதர்

   Fr Dayriam · Dhairyanathar

   1836 – 1837

The 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.

1. 26
   அலக்சாண்டர் மார்ட்டின்

   Fr Alex Martin

   அலக்சாண்டர் மார்ட்டின்

   Born at Nîmes on 15 December 1798, he was one of the first two Jesuits to set foot in this parish since the Society had been suppressed, visiting on 15–16 June 1838. His own path here had already run through Montrouge, Montmorillon and Bordeaux, the Roman College, and the Portugal mission at Lisbon. He did not live to see the mission he had helped restart take root: riding out to keep the Ascension feast, he fell ill and died at Idaikattur in the Marava less than two years later, on 30 May 1840, aged forty-two, the first Jesuit death of the whole renewed Madurai mission. Fr Louis du Ranquet, who would one day die the same way, had been his travelling companion.

   1838

2. 27

   Fr Louis Duranguet

   ஹம்போ தூராஸ்தெவில

   Fr Louis du Ranquet, S.J.

   One of the four Jesuits who restored the mission in 1838, from an Auvergne family that gave five sons to the Society. He was known here as le Sinnasouami du Sud, “the young lord of the South”. He fell ill on 6 November 1843 and died before dawn two days later, at Strivegondam; Fr Castanier, then superior of the southern district, arrived the next morning to bury him.

   1839 – 1840

3. 28
   அன்ரோனின் சேவல்

   Fr Antonius Sales

   அன்ரோனின் சேவல்

   Like Fr Alex Martin, whose visit opened this era, he had been a prisoner in the fortress of St-Julien in Portugal, freed only through the French ambassador's intervention. He reached the Fishery Coast with Bishop Canoz's own band of missionaries in 1839 and served this parish in 1841, before going on to found hospital-catechumenates at Trichinopoly and Madura and to serve as spiritual father of St Joseph's College for twelve years. He died on 7 July 1875.

   1841

4. 29

   Fr Constantine

   Castanier, in the souvenir

   1842 – 1843

5. 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

6. 31

   

   Fr Louis Verdier, S.J.

   ஞானப்பிரகாசியார்

   Gnanapragasiar souvami · pangou-souvami

   Vadakkankulam was his first appointment in India, on 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

7. 32
   ஜெரோம் மெஸ்

   Fr Hieronymus Maza

   ஜெரோம் மெஸ்

   Jérôme Mazza

   A refugee of the Piedmont revolution of 1848, he served at Aour and then the cholera-stricken Marava after this parish. He died on the last day of 1862, aged forty-eight, and his own Society recorded that he died en odeur de sainteté, in the odour of sanctity.

   1851 – 1852

8. 33
   ஜோசப் 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”. But on the very day the parish took possession of it, the congregation broke apart and the quarrel went to law; obliged to give evidence against part of his own flock, Grégoire lost his eating and his sleeping, and his strength never came back. He died in the crossing of the Red Sea on 19 September 1873, on the voyage home to France, and was buried at sea. Both of his chroniclers give that same date. An earlier reading of “1875” in one of them, published here for a time, turned out to be a damaged digit rather than a second date.

   1853 – 1861

9. 34
   காஸ்டானியர்

   Fr Clément Castanier, S.J.

   காஸ்டானியர்

   signed his own letters Alexis Castanier

   The parish's own sources call him Clément, but he signed his own letters Alexis Castanier. He was born in the Lozère on 16 February 1802, a Jesuit from 1826, and in India from 1839. He rose to superior of the mission's southern, northern and central districts in turn, and of Negapatam, and died on 17 February 1874. A full printed biography of him exists in French, in a two-volume history of fifty years of the Madurai mission.

   1862 – 1865

10. 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

11. 36

    Fr Guillielmus Pouget, S.J.

    William Pouget

    His first term; he would return in 1882 for eleven years.

    1870 – 1873

12. 37

    Fr William Paget

    வில்லியம் பேஜெட்

    1873 – 1874

13. 38

    Fr Ficiuos Babos

    பிரட்ரிக்கா போஸ்

    probably Fr Frixius Cabos, S.J.

    The name is very likely a garbling of Frixius Cabos, who had been superior of the whole Southern Mission of Madurai since 1869, so this single year here came in the middle of a much larger charge.

    1875

14. 39

    

    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, the eve of the feast of the most holy Name of Jesus”, 16 January 1887. He is buried in front of the church, and the black stone over him, photographed in 2026, is cut “Natus 10 Nov. 1835 · Mortuus 16 Jan. 1887”, the same date a survey of European tombs made in 1894 had already read: “1887, 16th January. Victor Delpech S.J., aged 52 years.”

    1876

15. 40
    ஜோசப் பெல்லஸ்வில்லே

    Fr Joseph Faseuille, S.J.

    ஜோசப் பெல்லஸ்வில்லே

    The Rome catalogue of 1880 lists him here as minister and superior. He went on to become Rector of St Joseph's College, Trichinopoly, and in 1887 Rome named him coadjutor bishop of Trichinopoly, a promotion he had the bulls withdrawn rather than accept, out of humility. He rose instead to Superior-General of the whole Madurai mission in 1898.

    1877 – 1882

16. 41
    வில்லியம் புக்கே

    Fr Guillielmus Pouget, S.J.

    வில்லியம் புக்கே

    By 1887 he was already the resident priest here, and it was in his arms that Fr Delpech died that January. Two Christmases later he took a visitor up into the church towers, pointed out a hedge at the garden's end and told him not to go near it after dark, because a tiger had carried off a cow from that spot the year before, and then opened the reliquary that holds St Devasahayam's turban and the chains he was bound with, so the visitor could see them for himself.

    1882 – 1893

17. 42

    Fr Joseph Faseuille, S.J.

    ஜோசப் சாங் பால்க்வில்லே

    His second term here, seventeen years after the first.

    1894 – 1895

18. 43

    Fr Adaikalam

    அடைக்கலம்

    1895 – 1896

19. 44

    Fr Peter Brien

    பீட்டர் புரண்ட் இன்போடாரியம்

    1896 – 1897

20. 45

    Fr Gabriel Berthien

    கபிரியேல் பெர்திஞ்

    Bertin

    His own brother, Fr Jacques Berthieu, was killed in Madagascar in 1896 for the faith, and canonised a saint in 2012.

    1897 – 1898

21. 46

    Fr Chinnappar

    சின்னப்பர்

    1899

22. 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

The 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.

1. 48

   

   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. In whatever hours he had left he sat with the parish's old registers and letters working out what they said, and wrote from them a history that the Society's archive still holds, and historians came to consult him about it. He founded the Brothers of the Sacred Heart at Palamcottah in 1902, and died at Kallikulam on 25 January 1930. His own obituary judged him two men at once: the difficult one that some in the mission never forgave, and the one the village would have canonised on the spot.

   1910 – 1919

2. 49

   Fr Ponor

   போனோசர்

   Alfred Bonhoure, S.J.

   His assistant here in 1921 was Fr Edgard Wafflart. Bonhoure himself went on to become Rector of St Joseph's College, Trichinopoly, and was, by trade, an entomologist.

   1919 – 1923

3. 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, Fr G. Michael, 4,765 Catholics and seventeen villages, one church of brick and four of clay.

   1924 – 1936

4. 51

   Fr Mariadas

   மரியதாஸ்

   1936 – 1943

5. 52

   Fr Joachim Fernando

   சுவக்கின்

   1943 – 1950

6. 53

   Fr Benedict

   In 1953 he built the kiosk that still stands beside the church.

   1950 – 1954

7. 54

   Fr Navamani

   அமல ஆதி நவமணி

   1954 – 1960

8. 55

   

   Fr Maria Ganam

   மரியதாசர்

   He invited the Bethany Sisters to the parish on 27 July 1970, and inaugurated a Legion of Mary praesidium the same year.

   1960 – 1974

9. 56

   

   Fr M. S. Antony

   அந்தோனியார்

   He had gone to school here himself, at St Theresa's, before he was ever its priest. Ordained in 1948, he served eleven parishes across four decades before he returned to Vadakkankulam to lead it, and while here he raised St Theresa's to a higher secondary school and laid the mosaic floor of the church itself. He is also credited with founding the parish's Don Bosco Youth Movement sodality in 1971, three years before his tenure as parish priest is otherwise listed as beginning. Among the vocations he guided was a boy who would himself become parish priest here decades later, Fr Thaddeus Rajan. He died on 3 October 2021.

   1974 – 1982

10. 57

    

    Fr Peter Raja

    The earliest parish priest of this church whose photograph the parish still holds.

    1982 – 1985

11. 58

    

    Fr Cruz Marian

    குருசுமரியன்

    1985 – 1988

12. 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

13. 60

    Fr Irudayaraj

    இருதயராஜ்

    recorded in the souvenir as Fr Sahayaraj

    In 1990–91 he gave the parish its separate Church of St Sebastian, with its teak-wood image.

    1990 – 1995

14. 61

    

    Rev. Msgr S. Mariadas

    மரியதாஸ்

    A Monsignor, the only one on this list.

    1995 – 1997

15. 62

    Fr Job De Rose

    His second term.

    1997 – 1998

16. 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

17. 64

    

    Fr N. A. Panneerselvam

    2003 – 2008

18. 65

    

    Fr Nelson Paul Raj

    நெல்சன் பால்ராஜ்

    2008 – 2013

19. 66

    

    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

20. 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

21. 68

    

    Fr Martin Manuvel

    Ordained in 1988, he moved on from here to become parish priest of St Antony's Church, Azhagappapuram.

    2023 – 2025

22. 69

    

    Fr A. Joseph Christian

    The sixty-ninth priest of this parish, and the one who has it now. Ordained in 1985, he also serves as Vicar Forane of the Vadakkankulam vicariate.

    2025 – today