"For a thousand years in your sight are but as yesterday when it is past, or as a watch in the night." — Psalm 90:4
The Question Everyone Asks
When people learn that Devasahayam was martyred in 1752 and canonised in 2022, the first question is almost always the same: why did it take 270 years?
The question is reasonable. A man is shot on a mountain for refusing to deny the Faith. The bishop orders the Te Deum. The community begins venerating him immediately. The miracles are reported and the pilgrimages begin. And then — 270 years pass before the Pope pronounces the formula in Saint Peter's Square.
The gap seems wrong. It seems like institutional failure — the Church's bureaucracy moving at the pace of the slowest conceivable process, leaving a martyr's cause to accumulate dust in Roman filing cabinets for centuries while the faithful of Kanyakumari kept the memory alive without formal support.
But the gap is not primarily a story of failure. It is a story of what the canonisation process is for — and why the Church has always insisted that the declaration of sanctity must be made carefully, with rigorous examination, and without the pressure of popular enthusiasm alone driving it to a premature conclusion.
Understanding the 270 years requires understanding what the Church is trying to do when she canonises a saint — and why doing it properly takes the time it takes.
What the Process Is For
The canonisation process exists to answer a specific question: can the Church declare, with moral certainty, that this person is in the presence of God and can be invoked by the universal Church?
The question has two parts. The first is historical: did this person live and die in a way consistent with heroic virtue or martyrdom in odium fidei? The second is theological: is there evidence — in the form of a miracle confirmed by rigorous medical and theological examination — that God has endorsed the Church's declaration by working through this person's intercession?
Both parts require evidence. Historical evidence, which must be gathered, examined, challenged, and confirmed by experts appointed specifically for that purpose. And miraculous evidence, which must survive the most demanding process of verification that the Church has developed: medical experts who are asked to exhaust every natural explanation before concluding there is none, followed by theological experts who are asked to establish the connection between the healing and the specific intercession of the Blessed.
The process is slow because the evidence must be assembled from multiple independent sources, examined by multiple independent experts, reviewed at multiple stages by increasingly senior bodies within the Dicastery for the Causes of Saints, and ultimately approved by the Pope. At each stage, the standard is not we believe this probably happened but we can affirm this with moral certainty — the standard that a court applying the highest evidentiary requirements would recognise.
This slowness is not a failure of the system. It is the system working as intended. The Church does not canonise saints quickly, because the declaration of canonisation is the most solemn declaration the Church's ordinary magisterium makes about the status of a specific person. The caution is the respect paid to the seriousness of the declaration.
Why the Early Appeals Failed
The first appeals on Devasahayam's behalf were made within four years of his death. Bishop Clemens Joseph Ray wrote to Pope Benedict XIV in 1756 — four years after the martyrdom, when the memory was still fresh and the community's conviction of his sanctity was at its most vivid. The appeal did not result in a formal cause being opened.
Why not?
Several factors combined against the early appeals. The most fundamental was the political and administrative situation of the Catholic Church in India in the mid-eighteenth century. The padroado controversy — the conflict between the Portuguese Crown's claimed right of ecclesiastical patronage in India and the Holy See's direct jurisdiction — had created a complex and often dysfunctional administrative situation in which the lines of authority over Indian Catholic communities were contested and unclear. The Diocese of Kottar itself was not formally erected until 1930. In 1756, the administrative infrastructure to advance a cause formally through the Roman process simply did not exist in the region.
Subsequent appeals — Bishop Joseph Kariyatil to Pope Clement XIII in 1763, the Carmelite scholar Paulinus to Pope Pius VI in 1794, Archbishop Selesky to Pope Leo XIII in 1896 — each encountered versions of the same problem: the absence of the institutional infrastructure, the difficulty of assembling the documentary evidence required for a formal cause from communities that had preserved the tradition orally rather than in written records, and the distance — geographical and administrative — between Kanyakumari and Rome.
These were not failures of faith or of will. They were the ordinary obstacles that the causes of the poor and the marginalized have always faced in comparison to the causes of the founders of religious orders and the bishops of great dioceses, whose institutions have the resources and the connections to advance their causes more efficiently. Devasahayam was a layman from a small diocese in the far south of India. His cause had to wait for the institutional capacity to advance it to be built.
The Modern Cause: 1984 to 2022
The modern cause was formally initiated in 1984 — 232 years after the martyrdom — when Bishop Arockia Swamy of the Diocese of Kottar appointed Fr. Leon Dharmaraj as the postulator on 28 November 1984. A diocesan prayer was released on 14 January 1985 — the feast day that had not yet been confirmed but was already being observed.
The cause then moved through the stages the Church requires:
1993: A thirteen-member committee formed on 3 December 1993 to advance the cause formally.
2003: A petition submitted to Cardinal Joseph Saraiva Martins, Prefect of the Congregation for the Causes of Saints, on 25 October 2003. Fr. George Nedungatt, S.J., appointed Postulator on 14 November 2003. The title Servant of God conferred on 22 December 2003 — the first formal stage, the Church's declaration that the cause has been opened.
2004: The Historical Commission began its work in July 2004 — the systematic examination of the historical record, the assembly and analysis of the documentary evidence for Devasahayam's martyrdom and virtues.
2006–2008: The Diocesan Inquiry conducted from 3 July 2006 to 7 September 2008 — the local formal investigation, gathering testimony and evidence under canonical procedures. The documents submitted to the Vatican on 24 September 2008.
2012: Pope Benedict XVI authorised the decree of martyrdom on 28 June 2012 — the declaration that the historical evidence establishes, with moral certainty, that Devasahayam was killed in odium fidei, in hatred of the Faith. He was titled Venerable. The Beatification followed on 2 December 2012 in Nagercoil, with Cardinal Angelo Amato presiding and 100,000 faithful gathered.
2016–2020: The miracle examination. Medical reports received 14 February 2016. Theologians affirmed 5 December 2019. Council of Cardinals and Bishops ratified 18 February 2020.
2022: Canonisation, 15 May 2022, Pentecost Sunday. Pope Francis. Saint Peter's Square.
Thirty-eight years from the formal opening of the modern cause to the canonisation. With the earlier appeals, 270 years from the martyrdom.
What the 270 Years Produced
The 270 years were not wasted. They were not merely a delay — time that intervened between the martyrdom and the recognition that should have come sooner. They were themselves a form of testimony.
Every year of those 270 years, the community of Kanyakumari kept the memory alive. Every pilgrimage to Muttidichanparai, every novena prayed at the tomb in Kottar, every petition brought to his intercession by the faithful who believed he was hearing them — all of this was happening before the Church had formally confirmed what the community already knew. The 270 years of unofficial, unconfirmed, persistent veneration are themselves evidence of the kind that the canonisation process respects: the sensus fidelium, the sense of the faithful, the conviction of the people of God that this person is with God.
The Church does not canonise saints on the strength of the sensus fidelium alone — the formal process exists precisely to test and confirm what the faithful believe, not simply to ratify it. But the sensus fidelium is the foundation on which the formal process builds. The 270 years of persistent veneration were not irrelevant to the canonisation. They were the evidence that the community had always known what the Church eventually declared.
And the 270 years produced something else: the documentation. The Historical Commission of 2004 had centuries of accumulated tradition to work with — oral accounts, written records, the memories of the communities nearest to the sites of his life and death, the evidence preserved in the churches of Vadakkankulam and Kottar and Aralvaimozhi and the pilgrimage sites. The cause had more, not less, evidence available to it because of the time that had passed — because three centuries of community memory is a deeper evidential base than the memory of a single generation.
What It Teaches About Patience
The 270 years teach the Church — and every individual Catholic who reads this — something about the relationship between God's timing and human expectation.
The community of Kanyakumari did not receive the canonisation in their own lifetimes. Bishop Clemens Joseph Ray, who wrote to Rome in 1756 with the conviction that the martyr of Aralvaimozhi deserved the Church's formal recognition, died without seeing the cause succeed. The bishops who made subsequent appeals, the priests who maintained the pilgrimage tradition, the laypeople who brought their needs to the tomb in Kottar and the mountain at Aralvaimozhi across two and a half centuries — none of them lived to see 15 May 2022.
They did the work anyway. They kept the memory anyway. They prayed the prayer anyway, in the confidence that the God who had heard Devasahayam on the mountain would hear them at the tomb, regardless of what the Roman process had or had not yet decided.
This is the faith that the 270 years required: not the faith that says God will confirm this in my lifetime, but the faith that says God will confirm this in His time, and our work is to keep the memory alive and the pilgrimage burning until He does. The faith of a community that planted and tended and waited — the faith, precisely, of the farmer who understands that the harvest happens when the grain is ready, not when the farmer is impatient.
For a thousand years in your sight are but as yesterday when it is past. God is not slow in the way that human impatience experiences slowness. He moves at the pace at which the work is completed — the pace at which the evidence accumulates, the cause matures, the community is ready to receive the declaration, the world is ready to hear the name.
The name was heard on 15 May 2022. The waiting was not in vain. It never is.
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