Place · pilgrimage church

Bharananganam

Also known as Bharananganam — tomb of St Alphonsa

Function

Sacred site & pilgrimage

Confidence

Established / referenced

Location

9.709, 76.855

Connections (3)

• Samadhi atAlphonsa Muttathupadathu

  Alphonsa taught at the parish school here and died in the convent at thirty-six, and her tomb in St Mary's Forane church became a local cult almost at once, carried by schoolchildren and by Kerala Christian households rather than promoted by her order. Beatification in 1986 and canonisation in 2008 turned a village churchyard into the largest Christian pilgrimage in the Kerala interior, with Hindu and Muslim petitioners arriving alongside Christians in the ordinary Kerala pattern.

• Institutional successionSt Francis Church, Kochi

  Bharananganam's parish belongs to the Syro-Malabar church, the body of Kerala Christians that kept an East Syriac liturgy under a Persian patriarch until the Portuguese forced a reorganisation at the Synod of Diamper in 1599 — the settlement that St Francis Church at Kochi and the Padroado hierarchy stand for. Alphonsa's canonisation in 2008 was read in Kerala as recognition of that ancient Indian rite rather than of any mission.

• Site adjacencyEttumanoor

  Bharananganam sits on the Meenachil river in Kottayam district, in the Christian heartland of the Kerala midlands where churches and temples stand within sight of each other in every village and where the Ettumanoor Shiva temple is a few kilometres away. The pilgrims who come to Alphonsa's tomb include Hindus and Muslims, which is unremarkable here and is a fair description of how Kerala shrines actually work.

On these journeys

• Indian saints of the Catholic church

Sources

Wikipedia, “Bharananganam”. Vatican canonisation records (Congregation for the Causes of Saints); diocesan archives named in the entry.

• Wikipedia — Bharananganam