Our Lady of Kuravilangad

This page is written with care, because the tradition is dear to many Kerala families and because love for it does not need claims it cannot bear. It tells the story as the tradition tells it, then says what history can and cannot show. The words of the Saint Thomas Christians are used here on purpose: Marth Mariam (Lady Mary, in Syriac), Muthiyamma (a Malayalam name of tender respect, the grandmother or elder mother), Moonnu Nombu (the three-day fast), madbaha (the sanctuary), Kappalottam (the running of the ship). In the Malayalam page the Syro-Malabar words for our Lord and for the Qurbana are used as well, because they are this church’s own.

The families from Palayur

According to the tradition of the Saint Thomas Christians, the apostle came to Kerala in AD 52 and founded a church at Palayur, baptising families remembered as Kalli, Kalikavu, Pakalomattom and Sankarapuri. From there, it is told, some of these families travelled south by way of Ettumanoor and settled near Kuravilangad, in the beginning of the second century according to one telling.

The children and the spring

Some children were tending their flock on the low hills of what was then forest. The heat, hunger and thirst drove them to look for water and roots to eat, and they lost their way. They called on God for help. In the empty forest a woman stood before them, holding a child with a cross in his hand. In the telling on the parish’s own document, as reported, she took up stones which became bread for them. Then she scratched the ground with her fingers, and a spring of water rose up. When they had eaten and drunk, they looked for her and she was gone.

They reached home at dusk and told their parents, who did not believe it. The next time the elders went back with the children to the place, and there, in a dry season, was a spring of clear water. The Blessed Virgin, carrying the infant Jesus, appeared again and told them to build a church in her name at that spot. Then she vanished. So the church was built on the hill and named for Marth Mariam. Some tellings speak of three boys. The spring still flows, and people still draw from it. They say it has never dried.

Nothing else is told of the children: no names, no later lives, no message beyond the request for a church. A manuscript of Fr Vichensa de Maria, cited in a history of the church by George, is said to tell of another appearance of the Muthiyamma; that account could not be read for this page.

Here it is best to be plain. Four dates are in circulation, and they do not agree.

What is well attested. The Portuguese account of Archbishop Menezes’s journey, the Jornada (printed 1606), reports according to a local historian who gives its pages that the archbishop laid the foundation stone of a new church at Kuravilangad in 1599, and that the old church was very dark and in the old style. So in 1599 a church already stood here, old enough to need replacing. In 1657 the papal envoy Sebastiani described a very beautiful church of St Mary Major here, with a chapel of St Sebastian and a fine granite cross. A bell with a Syriac inscription, “Mother of God”, is reported as cast in 1584. These are the firmer points. Their witness is that this was already an old, important Marian church when Europeans first wrote of it.

What cannot be shown. That an apparition happened, on any date. No known document from before the 16th century mentions it. The earliest form of the story has not been traced in any study available for this page. A devotional article says that Menezes himself recorded an appearance of Mary here in 1599, but no such passage could be found, and it is not repeated here as fact. Very little writing survives from the earlier centuries of the Thomas Christians, so silence proves little either way. A church’s long memory deserves respect, but it is not the same as a record.

“The first apparition in the world.” This phrase is often used, and printed signs at the church have made the point. It cannot be established. Spain’s tradition of Our Lady of the Pillar, for one, is set in the first century, and it too is a tradition. No one can rank such memories by date. It is fairer to say that Kuravilangad holds one of the oldest Marian traditions in India, and that the people who kept it were Christians long before Europeans reached Kerala. A writer in the Catholics and Cultures study of the church noted what the claim does for the faithful here: it shows that the faith is no foreign import. That part is true, whatever the date of the spring.