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.