A Friday forenoon in Aippasi

On the forenoon of Friday, 21 October 1803, in the Tamil month of Aippasi of the year 979, a man named Savarimuthu Pillai, who had come from Tirunelveli to see Mr Bilderbeck, a European settled in the village, went into the church to pray. The statue of Our Lady of the Assumption stood above the altar in a recess closed by a double door, and that morning both its leaves were open. As he knelt, a thin transparent cloud gathered behind her and wrapped her round. Her eyes lifted toward heaven and filled, and the tears ran down her cheeks; her face turned sorrowful; and her folded hands parted and stretched out until they touched the walls of the recess. And every other statue on the altar, the record says, “expressed compassion and mourning”. “I am the subject of an illusion,” he thought. He looked again, harder, and it had not stopped.

DevotionThis moment rests on 4 sources.

Besse (Moumas tr.)

a transparent cloud arose behind Our Lady and wrapped her up; the eyes of the Virgin looked up and filled up with tears; all her face expressed sadness; her joint hands parted and she stretched them out so far as to touch the walls of the recess. At the same time all the other statues on the altar expressed compassion and mourning.

What this source establishes

Besse’s own account, from the parish’s Moumas typescript (p.842), independent of Dessal and agreeing with him — the statue in a double-doored recess open at that moment, the cloud, the tears, the hands reaching the walls, and the detail found in none of the online retellings: “all the other statues on the altar expressed compassion and mourning”. In copyright: quoted, not reproduced.

This is as much of the book as this site prints. It is named in full in the bibliography below.