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.