Journey
Indian saints of the Catholic church
Four canonisations between 2008 and 2022 gave the Indian church saints of its own, and they are pointedly unalike: a village nun of the ancient Syro-Malabar rite, a foreign-born founder whose order is run from one Calcutta street, a Travancore courtier shot for converting, and a Goan priest who worked in Dutch Ceylon disguised as a labourer.
Stops (7)
- Alphonsa Muttathupadathu · Alphonsa Muttathupadathu, 1910–1946
A Syro-Malabar Franciscan Clarist sister from Kudamaloor who taught briefly, was ill for most of her adult life and died at thirty-six. Canonised in 2008, the first woman of Indian origin to be declared a saint. The cult grew from below, out of Kerala Christian households and school processions, rather than being promoted by an order or a mission.
- Bharananganam · Bharananganam — the tomb
St Mary's Forane church on the Meenachil river in Kottayam district, where Alphonsa is buried. Since 2008 it has become the busiest Christian pilgrimage in the Kerala interior, and like most Kerala shrines it draws Hindu and Muslim petitioners alongside Christians — the vow, not the creed, is what brings people to the tomb.
- Teresa of Calcutta · Teresa of Calcutta, 1910–1997
An Albanian-born Loreto nun who taught at Entally, left the convent in 1948 for the Motijhil slum and founded the Missionaries of Charity in 1950. She took Indian citizenship, and the order she built now works in more than a hundred countries. Her hospices and her views on suffering and medical care have been seriously criticised.
- Mother House, Kolkata · Mother House, Kolkata
54A A.J.C. Bose Road, the headquarters of the Missionaries of Charity since 1953 and the only Indian address that governs a worldwide Catholic order. Teresa is buried under a plain slab on the ground floor, in the room where the sisters pray — an ordinary building on a loud road, which is roughly the point of it.
- Devasahayam Pillai · Devasahayam Pillai, 1712–1752
A Nair official of the Travancore court who converted under the Dutch commander Eustachius De Lannoy, took the name Lazarus, and was paraded on a buffalo, tortured and finally shot at Aralvaimozhi. Canonised in 2022, he is the first Indian layman — neither priest nor member of an order — to be made a saint.
- St Xavier's Cathedral, Kottār · Kottār, Nagercoil
The cathedral of the southernmost Tamil coast, grown from a chapel of Francis Xavier's mission among the Paravar fisher communities in the 1540s, and now holding Devasahayam's relics. This coast has had a mass Catholic population for nearly five centuries, longer than most of Latin America.
- Joseph Vaz · Joseph Vaz, 1651–1711
A Konkani priest of the Goan Oratory who crossed into Dutch Ceylon in 1687 disguised as a labourer, at a time when Catholic priesthood there carried a death sentence, and rebuilt the church from the Buddhist kingdom of Kandy. He learned Sinhala and Tamil and wrote in both; canonised at Colombo in 2015, the first saint of the Goan church.