"How beautiful are the feet of those who preach good news." — Romans 10:15
The Man at the Other End of the Letter
When De Lannoy placed a letter in Neelakandan's hands and sent him twenty kilometres south to Vadakkankulam, he was sending him to a specific man — not merely to the nearest available priest, not to whichever Jesuit happened to be stationed in the region, but to a man he knew and trusted, a man whose character and judgement he believed were equal to what was being asked of them.
That man was Fr. Giovanni Battista Buttari.
He is not famous. He has no feast day. The Church has opened no cause for him. He appears in the sources of Devasahayam's life as a supporting figure — the priest who instructed, the priest who baptised, the priest who documented the wounds, the priest who was transferred away before the martyrdom and died six years after it in a town fifty kilometres to the north. He is the kind of man who does not appear in the foreground of history but without whom the foreground would not exist.
Without Fr. Buttari there is no baptism. Without the baptism there is no Christian Devasahayam. Without the Christian Devasahayam there is no martyr. Without the martyr there is no saint.
The man in the foreground of this story owes everything, under God, to the man who received him at the door of the Holy Family Church in Vadakkankulam and said: come in. I will prepare you. Take the time it takes. I will be here.
Born in Rome, Called to India
Giovanni Battista Buttari was born on 22 February 1707 — the feast of the Chair of Saint Peter — near Rome. He was Italian, formed in the culture and the theology of the city that is the centre of the Catholic world, educated in the rigorous intellectual tradition of the Society of Jesus, and sent — as Jesuits had been sent from Europe to the ends of the earth since the days of Saint Francis Xavier — to India.
He arrived in India in 1739, assigned initially to the Jesuit mission at Neyman (Neyoor) in the far south of Travancore, and then to Kochi for a period, before being appointed to revitalise the mission at Vadakkankulam in 1741 — the same year De Lannoy was taken prisoner at Colachel, the same year Marthanda Varma imposed his anti-conversion law for court officials. The convergences of Providence are rarely visible at the moment they occur.
He served the Holy Family Church at Vadakkankulam from 1744 to 1750 — the six years that bracket the most important events of his ministry. The church itself was old: it had been built by the Jesuit martyr Blessed John de Britto (Arulanandar) in 1685, on the site of a chapel long tended by a man called Santhai Sanaati. It stood in a parish that was significantly outside the direct jurisdiction of King Marthanda Varma — under British influence in the complex territorial patchwork of 18th-century south India — which made it the right place for what was about to happen.
The Tamil community knew him as Paranjothi Nathar — a Tamil name chosen in the long Jesuit tradition of inculturation established by Roberto de Nobili a century earlier, the tradition of meeting the people in their own language and their own cultural forms while holding the Faith entire and uncompromised. He was a European priest in a Tamil community, and he was present enough, humble enough, and deeply enough formed in his vocation to be called by a Tamil name and to wear it as it was intended.
The Hesitation
When Neelakandan arrived at the Vadakkankulam parish house with De Lannoy's letter, Buttari's response was not immediate welcome. It was hesitation. Careful, prudent, loving hesitation — but hesitation nonetheless.
He had every reason for it.
Marthanda Varma's law was explicit: high-ranking court officials who converted to Christianity faced severe penalties, up to and including imprisonment and execution. Neelakandan was not a minor figure seeking baptism under the radar of royal authority. He was a palace official of significant standing — administrator of the Nelakantaswamy Temple, overseer of the royal fortification works, a man with command over a section of the armed forces. His conversion, if it became known — and in the world of an 18th-century royal court, such things invariably became known — would be a political event as well as a religious one.
Buttari feared for Neelakandan. He feared not the physical danger to himself — a Jesuit priest in 18th-century south India was accustomed to the possibility of physical danger, and the Society of Jesus had buried enough martyrs to have formed its men for that possibility — but the danger that Neelakandan would be pressured into apostasy before he was sufficiently formed in the Faith to withstand it. A man baptised in haste, without adequate preparation, without the deep grounding in the Scriptures and the teaching of the Church that could sustain him under pressure, might recant when the pressure came. And the pressure, Buttari knew, would come.
So he waited. He tested. He examined the quality of this man's resolve before he was willing to commit him to what baptism in these circumstances would mean.
And Neelakandan, sensing the hesitation, did what the sources record with a plainness that still arrests the reader across three centuries: he declared himself.
"I am ready to endure crucifixion like Jesus willingly. All that I have — my possessions, my comforts, my friends, my family — I am prepared to dedicate to God."
Buttari heard this and knew he was not dealing with a man who had not counted the cost. He was dealing with a man who had counted it, found it worth paying, and was asking to be given the grace to pay it. The hesitation ended. The instruction began.
Nine Months
Nine months. The same span of time that a child is formed in the womb before it is brought into the light. The Church has always understood that this is not a coincidence: the catechumenate — the period of preparation for baptism — is a gestation, a forming in the dark before the birth into the life of grace.
For nine months, Neelakandan came to Buttari — travelling the twenty kilometres from Nagercoil to Vadakkankulam with the regularity of a man who has found the thing he has been looking for and cannot stay away from it. And for nine months, Buttari gave him everything the tradition of the Church had given him to give.
He taught him the Scriptures — not merely as texts to be memorised but as the living word of the God who had made Neelakandan and had been preparing him, through the losses and the grief and the conversation with De Lannoy, for exactly this. He taught him the Creed — the summary of the Faith in the exact words the Church had hammered out across centuries of prayer and controversy, the words that say who God is and what He has done and what He has promised. He taught him the sacraments — what they are, what they do, how the physical materials of water and oil and bread and wine become, in the hands of the Church and by the power of the Spirit, the vehicles of the grace that saves.
He also gave Neelakandan the writings of Veeramamunivar — the great Tamil Catholic theologian and poet also known as Constanzo Giuseppe Beschi (1680–1747), the Jesuit scholar who had spent decades mastering Tamil literature and producing Catholic theology and devotion in the highest registers of the Tamil literary tradition. For Neelakandan, educated in Tamil at the level of a man who had studied it as a classical language, Beschi's writings were not foreign importations dressed in borrowed clothing. They were the Faith arriving in the language of his own deepest formation — Catholic theology in classical Tamil, speaking to him from within his own cultural world rather than from outside it.
And Buttari watched. He observed Neelakandan's questions — their quality, their persistence, their honesty. He observed the speed and depth of the understanding. He set tests — not examinations in the academic sense, but the tests of character and resolve that a confessor applies when he needs to know whether a man's conversion is of the surface or the depths. He observed, over nine months of regular encounter, the kind of man Neelakandan was, and what grace was doing in him.
What he found, at the end of nine months, was a man as ready for baptism as any man he had ever prepared. Ready not in the sense of having all the answers, but in the deeper sense: a man who had genuinely surrendered himself to the God he was asking to serve, who knew the cost and had accepted it, who was no longer the man who had arrived at the parish house door with De Lannoy's letter. He was, in the language the Church uses for the catechumenate's culminating moment, electus — chosen, called, ready to be born.
The Baptism — 14 May 1745
On 14 May 1745, at the Holy Family Church in Vadakkankulam, Buttari baptised Neelakandan.
The rite was the ancient rite of the Church: the water poured three times in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, the words spoken over the head of a man kneeling at the font, the indelible mark of the sacrament imprinted on a soul that could never be entirely the same again. The death of the old man. The birth of the new.
The name given at baptism was Devasahayam — the Tamil rendering of Lazarus, meaning God has helped. The choice of name was deliberate and theologically precise: Lazarus was the man Christ raised from the dead, the man whose resurrection was the sign that pointed forward to the Resurrection itself, the man at whose tomb Christ wept because He was God made man and God made man weeps at the graves of those He loves. To give this name to a man who had come to Christ through suffering, who had been brought to the font by the providence of loss, who would himself one day die and be raised — was to read the future in the act of baptism with the eyes of faith.
Buttari read it. He gave the name.
The godfather was Gnanaprakasham, the sacristan of the Vadakkankulam parish — a man of the community, present and responsible, giving his name and his commitment to the newly baptised as the Church requires. His presence matters: Devasahayam was received not into an abstract Christianity but into a specific community, with a specific man pledging his support, in a specific church in a specific town.
Later, Buttari would also receive Bhargavi Ammal — Neelakandan's wife, his first convert, the woman who had initially resisted and then yielded to the grace that her husband's life had made visible. She was baptised Gnanapu Theresa: the Tamil Gnanapu for Teresa, the name of the great Carmelite reformer who had said that God alone suffices. The choice of patron was also a reading: a woman who would need, in the years ahead, everything that the woman of Avila had found sufficient.
The Documentation of the Wounds
After the baptism, in the years of Devasahayam's imprisonment, Buttari served as more than a pastor. He served as a witness.
He visited Devasahayam in prison as often as the guards permitted. He brought him the sacraments — three times in three years, the sources record, Devasahayam received Holy Communion in the prison, each visit a feat of pastoral persistence in the face of guards whose orders were to prevent exactly this kind of access. He brought the Bread of Life to a man who was being systematically deprived of every other kind of sustenance.
And he documented what he saw.
Thirty-two wounds — this is the number Fr. Buttari recorded, with the precision of a man who understood that what he was witnessing was not merely suffering but testimony, not merely injury but evidence. He counted them. He named them. He preserved the record. The documentation of Devasahayam's wounds in Buttari's hand is one of the primary sources on which the Church's examination of his martyrdom rested. Without Buttari's witnessing, without his careful recording of what was being done to the man in the prison, the historical case for the martyrdom would be substantially weaker.
This is another form of his priesthood: not the dramatic form of baptising a saint, but the quiet, persistent, costly form of going back to the prison, again and again, to see and to record and to bring the sacraments to the man who was dying in chains for the Faith that Buttari had given him.
The Transfer and the Death
In 1751 — one year before Devasahayam's martyrdom — Buttari was transferred. He was appointed to the Periyanayaki Madha Church at Avoor (Auvoor), a historic parish in the southern part of the Tiruchirappalli region, approximately fifty kilometres north of his previous station.
The timing was painful. He had been with Devasahayam through the arrest, through the torture, through the years of jungle imprisonment. He had brought him the sacraments three times at the risk of his own safety. And now, in the last year of Devasahayam's life, he was moved away.
He remained at Avoor. He ministered to the parish. He continued the work that a Jesuit priest in 18th-century south India continued regardless of circumstances: Mass, sacraments, instruction, the daily unglamorous business of keeping the Faith alive in a community.
He died on 19 May 1757 — the feast day, in some traditions, associated with the Assumption — at the age of fifty. He was buried near the Avoor church.
The sources preserve one final detail that speaks volumes about the bonds that Devasahayam's story created among those who had lived it: Gnanapu Ammaiyar — the widow of the martyr, Devasahayam's wife, who was at that point living her fourteen years of faithful widowhood in Vadakkankulam — made the journey to Avoor to attend Buttari's funeral. She came to bury the man who had baptised her husband. She came to honour, with her presence, the priest who had been the human instrument of everything that had followed from that May morning in 1745.
She was the last link in the chain, coming to close it. It is the right ending for his story.
What Fr. Buttari Teaches
He was an ordinary priest doing ordinary priestly work in difficult circumstances. He was not a martyr. He was not a bishop or a theologian or a famous preacher. He was a Jesuit parish priest in a small town in the far south of India, assigned to a mission that most people in Rome would never have heard of, serving a community whose language he had learned and whose name for him — Paranjothi Nathar — he had accepted as his own.
He taught Neelakandan the Faith across nine months of patient instruction. He baptised him with the Church's ancient rite and gave him the name that was a prophecy. He brought him the sacraments in prison three times at personal risk. He documented thirty-two wounds with the care of a man who knew that what he was recording mattered. He was transferred before the end and died six years after it, in a parish fifty kilometres away, at the age of fifty.
This is the life of a faithful priest. Not dramatic, not public, not the kind of life that appears in the foreground of history. The kind of life that makes the foreground of history possible.
Every saint has a Buttari somewhere in their story — the priest who instructed them, the priest who baptised them, the priest who brought them the sacraments in the difficult years, the priest who documented what was happening to them with care and fidelity. The saints are remembered. The Buttaris are usually not. But God remembers them. And the Church, when she examines the lives of her saints and traces the threads of grace that led them to the martyrdom or the heroic virtue that qualifies them for her altars, always finds the Buttari — the faithful ordinary priest whose faithful ordinary priestly work was the soil in which the saint grew.
"How beautiful are the feet of those who preach good news."
Buttari's feet walked twenty years of south Indian roads to bring the Gospel to communities that no one else was reaching. They walked to a prison to bring a dying man the Body of Christ. They are, in exactly the sense Saint Paul means, beautiful.
A Prayer for the Memory of Fr. Buttari
He has no feast day. He has no approved prayer. But he has this:
O God, who in your Providence raised up Fr. Giovanni Battista Buttari as the instrument of Saint Devasahayam's formation in the Faith, grant that all who labour in your vineyard without recognition or reward may know that their work is not hidden from your eyes. May his faithful priestly ministry be rewarded in your presence, and may we who benefit from the saint he formed honour the man whose patient instruction made that saint possible.
Eternal rest grant unto him, O Lord. And let perpetual light shine upon him. May he rest in peace. Amen.
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