01 / 11
1838
The French Jesuits return
After more than sixty years without a resident Jesuit, the restored Society of Jesus came down into the southern mission and Vadakkankulam returned to Jesuit care. On their very first visit the new French fathers found the people seated apart by caste in the old chapel, a wound the parish would spend a century learning to heal.
02 / 11
1839
The novena and feast of St Francis Xavier
In 1839 the superior of the Madurai mission, Fr Joseph Bertrand, kept the great novena and the solemn feast of St Francis Xavier at Vadakkankulam. The bishop, then on visitation, asked him to part from him for it, and to go on afterwards inland to Palamcottah. Bertrand's own journal records the day: on horseback at half past two in the morning, at the church by eight on 23 November, and mass to open the novena and the year's administration of the sacraments.
03 / 11
1848
Bishop Canoz asks the village for a church
The great church began with a request. Auguste Jean records that on his pastoral tour of 1848 Bishop Alexis Canoz, Vicar Apostolic of Madurai, “visited Vadakenkoulam” — the parish’s own history dates the visit to 21 June. It is that history alone, and no outside source, which remembers what he asked for: that the people begin gathering money for a large new church. Seven years later he came back to bless its foundation stone.
04 / 11
1838–1855
The benefactors the parish remembers
To the years of gathering, the parish's own history attaches a story of gratitude: the Bilderbeck family — the name reaching the parish books garbled as "Hentriett Belderk" — childless through twenty-seven years of marriage, prayed to Our Lady of this church, were granted a child, and gave generously toward the new building. The jubilee souvenir keeps the same memory in Tamil: within a year a son was born, and their joy passed all measure. It is memory, and this page records it as memory: no printed history we have opened names any benefactor of this church — Auguste Jean credits it to Fr Grégoire's "persevering energy" alone — and Christopher Bilderbeck himself had died in 1817, thirty-eight years before the foundation stone. Whether Besse's unread chronicle records the family's gift is one of the questions his book still holds.
05 / 11
1855
The foundation stone of the great church
On 9 August 1855 Bishop Alexis Canoz of Madurai blessed the foundation stone of the present Holy Family Church. The parish's own history records that one of its priests composed for the occasion the bold motto of the whole design: "Templum sit duplex, ara sed una" — let the temple be twofold, but the altar one; may both castes be of one faith and one mind. The verse comes down to us in the parish's books; no one has read it off the stone.
06 / 11
1855–1872
Fr Joseph Grégoire, apostle of Vadakkankulam
For some seventeen patient years the work was driven by Fr Joseph Grégoire SJ, the man who gave this community a church one historian called "probably without equal in the world." It is his Jesuit chronicler Auguste Jean, and he alone, who calls him "the apostle of Vadakenkoulam." The Jesuit lay-brother Joseph Bergenthal engineered its twenty-four self-supporting arches, turned in lime and palm-toddy mortar without cement, iron, or a single wooden beam to hold them.
07 / 11
1861
Two bells cast in France
The parish's twin bells were cast in France in 1861, the gift of a benefactor named Casimir Grégoire — the bell in the tower still bears his name in its bronze. Packed in crates, they came by sea to Madras and up through Tirunelveli, and were finally hung in 1872, one in each of the church's two new towers, their joined ringing giving, the people still say, a sweetness of sound heard nowhere else in this land.
08 / 11
1863
A tomb beside the church
What the long building cost is written beside the church. “The piety of the Christians of Vadakenkoulam raised, near their church, a modest tomb to Fr Eugène Rossignol, who died on 25 January 1863” — he had caught the disease nursing the cholera-stricken Christians of Callikoulam. Fr Victor Delpech, who anointed the dying Fr Grégoire aboard ship, came back and died here himself, in the arms of Fr Pouget. Dessal gives the day as 16 January 1887; Auguste Jean says only that it was a Saturday.
09 / 11
c.1864
A convent of native nuns
Setting down the mission's returns for about 1864, a British district manual lists three convents in the whole Jesuit mission of Tinnevelly: one at Tuticorin, one at Adeikalapuram, and "A Convent for Native Nuns at Vadakankulam" — the only one away from the fishery coast. Sisters were living here while the great church was still building. No parish record dates a convent here so early; it is the district manual alone that remembers them.
10 / 11
1872
The two-nave church blessed
In 1872 the finished Holy Family Church was blessed — by Bishop Canoz, the parish's own history records. The district gazetteer sets the building down plainly: "two converging naves which meet in a common chancel." Auguste Jean called the plan an open compass: two naves splayed apart at their doors, drawing nearer, meeting at one shared sanctuary. The parish's history adds two octagonal towers of ninety-two feet, and vaults painted with dyes drawn from plants and trees.
11 / 11
1873 or 1875
Fr Grégoire dies at sea
He did not long outlive the church. “What the building of this sanctuary cost him in cares and fatigues, God alone knows,” wrote his chronicler. Sent home on his doctors’ advice, Fr Grégoire never reached the end of the voyage: he died in the crossing of the Red Sea, anointed by Fr Victor Delpech. His two chroniclers agree on the day and differ only on the year: both put his death on 19 September — Auguste Jean in 1873, Dessal in 1875. He had been thirty years a missionary.
