1775–1838

The years no Jesuit came

For sixty-three years no Jesuit served this parish. It was not abandoned. Priests came from Goa under the Bishop of Cochin, and the roll of them runs without a gap: Deva Varadhanar, Ignatius, John Louis Cardoza and their successors. The feast was kept, the children were baptised, the dead were buried. And the village did more than hold on. From about 1780 it became “the sole centre of the inland mission”, with four divisional centres set under it, Sendamangalam, Andipatti, Kamanayakkanpatti and the village itself, served by priests from Cochin who “did their best to keep up the foundations already existing” until they made over the whole charge, in 1837, to the first new Jesuits at Palamcottah. Through all of it, the most extraordinary thing that has ever happened here happened in the middle of that time.

DocumentedThis moment rests on 5 sources.

Besse (Moumas tr.)

During the 63 years between the death of Fr. Thomassini and the arrival of the new Jesuits in 1838

What this source establishes

Besse’s own words open this era, from the parish’s Moumas typescript (p.842): the 63 years between Thomassini’s death and the new Jesuits of 1838, in which “many interesting events took place but have… been more or less disfigured by tradition. One however seems to have all guarantees of its authenticity” — the sentence that leads straight into the 1803 account. In copyright: quoted, not reproduced.

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