Verdier, dans l'espoir de faire une paix définitive, imagina le plan d'une église, unique au monde peut-être : un vaste secteur à deux nefs séparées par un couloir, avec une abside commune au fond de l'angle aigu.
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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.
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Dessal, a Jesuit of the same mission, says only that the church is "unique au monde peut-être" — unique in the world, PERHAPS. The hedge is worth keeping: the mission's own chroniclers never claimed more than that.