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.
Gazetteer Suppl. 1934p. 169
In 1759, the Society of Jesus was declared suppressed in Portugal and its dominions and all the Jesuits on whom the Portuguese could lay hands were seized and deported to the prisons of Lisbon. The priests of Mysore and Madura, and of the Fishery and Travancore coasts continued in their jurisdiction as before, though it was not possible to fill in by fresh recruits any vacancies that occurred among them. In 1773 came Pope Clement XIV^s Bull of suppression of the Jesuits throughout the world which, ^*An exact description of Malabar bj Philip Baldaeus, Amsterdam, 1692. 169 however, left the position of the missionaries in the district in tlie same state as before. Till 1780, the two Jesuit missions working in the district had been attached to two different Ordinaries, the Fishery Coast mission to that of Cochin, and the inland mission to Cranganore but the distinction ceased about this time and both were administered by the Ordinary of Cochin. Vadakkankulam then became the sole centre of the inland mission with four divisional centres under separate categories Sendamangalam, Andipatti, Kamanayakkanpatti and Vadakkankulam itself. This centre was served by priests from Cochin with the real missionary spirit who did their best to keep up the foundations already existing and made over their charge in 1837 to the first new J esuit missionaries who arrived in Palarncotta that year. But the Goanese priests who had stepped into the places of the old Jesuits in the Fishery Coast showed at first some reluctance to surrender their charges, and trouble arose in consequence. They had allowed all sorts of abuses to creep in, and the adminis- tration and enjoyment of church revenue had fallen into the hands of the local Pattangattis and of their chief. The new mis- sionaries were, however, welcomed everywhere and the Padroado priests submitted themselves to the new order and departed, but the attempts of the new priests met with opposition from those who had secured an unjust hold over the revenues and goods of the church and organized a campaign of insubordi- nation to the lawful jurisdiction of the Vicar Apostolic of the Coromandel Coast.
169

Shown in part. The rest of this page is not reproduced here.

Madras District Gazetteers: Tinnevelly, Vol. II — Statistical Appendix & SupplementK. N. Krishnaswami Ayyar — Madras: Government Press, 1934, p. 169

Published before 1930. In the public domain, and reproduced here in full.

What this source establishes

The upgrade that turns the ‘empty’ years around. The 1934 Tinnevelly Gazetteer Supplement (p.169), a government record with no interest in the parish, sets down that Vadakkankulam “became the sole centre of the inland mission with four divisional centres… Sendamangalam, Andipatti, Kamanayakkanpatti and Vadakkankulam itself”, served from Cochin until the charge was made over to the new Jesuits in 1837. Windowed to this sentence: its neighbours on the page carry the 1744 caste decree, which the parish keeps off the site.