Place · cathedral & martyr shrine
St Xavier's Cathedral, Kottār
Also known as Kottar, Nagercoil, Kottār, Nagercoil — St Xavier's Cathedral
The cathedral of the southernmost Tamil coast, founded on a chapel associated with Francis Xavier's mission among the Paravar fishing communities in the 1540s, and now the resting place of Devasahayam Pillai's relics.
- Function
- Sacred site & pilgrimage
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 8.179, 77.430
Connections (4)
- Samadhi atDevasahayam Pillai
Devasahayam's relics rest in the Kottār cathedral at Nagercoil, the see of the southernmost Tamil coast, which grew out of Francis Xavier's mission among the Paravar fisher communities in the 1540s. He was shot at Aralvaimozhi in 1752 after three years of public humiliation for converting while holding office at the Travancore court, and his canonisation in 2022 made him the first Indian layman — neither priest nor religious — to be declared a saint.
- Craft tradition ofVillu Pāṭṭu
The bow song belongs to the Kanyakumari and Tirunelveli country, where the Paravar and Nadar Christian populations are as old as the Catholic mission of the 1540s that Kottār cathedral grew out of. Villu pāṭṭu troupes perform at church festivals and at village deity festivals in the same week, with the same instrument and the same narrative structure, which is a fair description of how religion actually works on this coast.
- Teaching lineageSan Thome, Mylapore
Kottār's cathedral grew from Francis Xavier's mission among the Paravar pearl-fishers of this coast in the 1540s, and San Thome at Mylapore, three hundred kilometres north, is built over the tomb the Thomas tradition names. Between them they hold the two Catholic claims on the Tamil coast — an apostolic one of the first century and a Jesuit one of the sixteenth — and the second was preached partly on the strength of the first.
- CampaignPadmanābhaswāmī, Thiruvananthapuram
Devasahayam was an official at the Travancore court whose kings ruled in the name of Padmanabhaswamy and had formally surrendered the kingdom to the deity in 1750, two years before his execution. A courtier's conversion under those conditions was read as a transfer of allegiance rather than a private matter, which is the whole substance of the case against him and the reason a layman rather than a priest was the one put to death.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Nagercoil”. Vatican canonisation records (Congregation for the Causes of Saints); diocesan archives named in the entry.
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