Place · Marian pilgrimage shrine · India
Gunadala Matha Shrine, Vijayawada
The Catholic pilgrimage shrine on Gunadala hill in Vijayawada, Andhra Pradesh — a Marian complex built round a hilltop cross and a Lourdes-style grotto by Fr. Arlati of the Diocese of Guntur in 1925. It is the largest Catholic pilgrimage centre in the Telugu country, drawing about a million pilgrims to its February feast of Our Lady of Lourdes, and one of the sites that ties South-Indian Catholic devotion to a global Marian network.
- Function
- Sacred site & pilgrimage
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 16.518, 80.654
Worth knowing
The complex holds a Christian cemetery of relics collected from around the world — fragments from Rome, Fatima and Lourdes — and its cross on the summit is lit through the year and visible from the Krishna river.
Connections (3)
- Shared sacred geographyEstado da Índia — Portuguese India
Gunadala is what came after the Estado da Índia in the Telugu country: the shrine was raised in 1925 by an Italian PIME priest in the Diocese of Guntur, on ground the Padroado had never held, and its Marian devotion is Roman Catholic in form but not Portuguese by history. It stands for the second, post-Padroado Catholic geography of Andhra Pradesh — one built by Italian and Irish missions rather than the crown of Lisbon.
- Shared sacred geographySan Thome, Mylapore
San Thome and Gunadala are the two great Marian shrines of coastal Andhra-Tamil Catholicism, three hundred kilometres apart along the Coromandel. San Thome is where the tradition places the apostle's tomb and the roots of the Latin rite in the south; Gunadala is the twentieth-century pilgrimage centre that draws a million pilgrims a year to its February feast. Between them they hold the older and the newer poles of the same Catholic map.
- Site withinVijayawada
The Gunadala Matha Catholic shrine sits within Vijayawada on the Gunadala hill in the city's eastern suburbs, 5 kilometres from the central Vijayawada railway station. The 1925 shrine built by Fr Arlati of the Pontifical Institute for Foreign Missions became the central Catholic pilgrimage of Andhra Pradesh. The shrine's annual February Marian feast draws over a million pilgrims from across the Krishna-Godavari delta. Gunadala's position within Vijayawada makes it one of the city's three principal religious landmarks (with Kanaka Durga and the Hinkar Thirtha Jain temple), illustrating Vijayawada's layered multi-religious geography.
Sources
Wikipedia, "Gunadala Matha Shrine"; Diocese of Vijayawada.
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