1803

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.