The Founder of Our Parish
The Portuguese Jesuit who, in 1685, raised the first thatched chapel of the Holy Family at Vadakkankulam — the founding act from which this whole shrine descends. Martyred for the faith at Oriyur in 1693, he is venerated across the Tamil land as Arulanandar.
Arulanandar — “the bliss of grace”
The whole crime of which I am accused is that I teach the law of the true God. How glorious to suffer and to die for so beautiful a cause!
— from his own hand, written in the prison of Oriyur the night before his death, 3 February 1693
01
João de Brito was born in Lisbon on 1 March 1647, into a noble family of the Portuguese court; as a boy he was a companion of the future King Pedro II. At fifteen he laid aside every prospect of that world and entered the Society of Jesus, and in time asked to be sent to the mission of the Indies — the hardest and most distant field the Society then knew.
02
In South India he took up the method of Roberto de Nobili: to reach the Tamil people he laid aside the European's dress and diet and lived as a pandaraswami, a wandering ascetic — no meat, no comfort, travelling on foot from village to village. It carried the Gospel where a foreigner in foreign clothes could never have gone. The mission he served, the vast inland kingdom of Madurai, reached down into this southern country.
03
In 1685, while he was Superior of the Madurai Mission, de Britto came to the forest clearing of Vadakkankulam, where a Christian woman had already raised a roadside cross, and built a small thatched chapel — a “hut of branches” — dedicated to the Holy Family, baptising some two hundred people. That chapel is the seed of everything that followed: the stone church of 1752, the great two-nave church of 1872, the shrine declared in 1993. Every stone of Little Rome traces back to his hut. The colonial district gazetteer independently dates Christianity here to “the closing years of the seventeenth century.”
04
Arrested and left for dead once already, de Britto was sent back to Portugal in 1687, where the court received him with honour and begged him to stay. He refused. Knowing that a return to the mission almost certainly meant death, he asked to go back to his Tamil Christians — and did, reaching the mission again in 1691.
05
Within two years he was seized again. Imprisoned at Oriyur, he wrote a last letter of serene joy the night before he died. On 4 February 1693 he was beheaded for the faith. His body was venerated at once; the King of Portugal had a church raised on the ground of his martyrdom, and pilgrims still go to Oriyur. He was beatified in 1853 and canonised by Pope Pius XII in 1947. To the Tamil Church he is Arulanandar — “the bliss of grace.”
Our Parish Bond
St John de Britto is honoured across the Tamil land, but at Vadakkankulam he is more than a saint venerated — he is the founder. The parish begins with his hands.
The thatched chapel of the Holy Family that de Britto built here in 1685 is the first church of Vadakkankulam. The parish, the shrine, the whole story of Little Rome begins with it.
An unbroken line runs from his hut of branches to the stone church of 1752, the great two-nave church blessed in 1872, and the shrine proclaimed in 1993. Four churches on one ground — and his is the first.
The martyr-founder is kept in devotion at the parish he began — including the John de Britto grotto within the shrine grounds, where he stands as Arulanandar between St Michael and St Raphael.
Sources
Compiled from Giuseppe Boero, S.J., Vita del beato Giovanni de Britto (Rome: La Civiltà Cattolica, 1853); from de Britto's own prison letter of 3 February 1693, printed in Joseph Bertrand, S.J., La Mission du Maduré, Vol. III; and from F. W. Faber, The Lives of… the Ven. John de Britto (London, 1851). See the shrine's Sources page.