15 May 2022
"Well done, good and faithful servant. You have been faithful over a little; I will set you over much. Enter into the joy of your master." — Matthew 25:21
The Morning in Saint Peter's Square
Sunday, 15 May 2022.
The feast of Pentecost — the day the Church commemorates the descent of the Holy Spirit on the Apostles in the upper room, the birthday of the Church, the day the disciples who had been hiding behind locked doors went out into the streets of Jerusalem and began to preach in every language to every nation gathered there. The day the Church was born as a missionary reality, as a community sent rather than gathered, as the body through which the Spirit of the risen Christ was to reach the ends of the earth.
Pope Francis chose to canonise Devasahayam Pillai on Pentecost Sunday. The choice was not accidental. A man from the ends of the earth — from the southernmost tip of India, from Kanyakumari where three seas meet, from the kingdom of Travancore where a Dutch prisoner had once opened a Scripture that a Hindu court official needed — was being placed on the universal calendar of the Church on the day that celebrates the Spirit's movement to every corner of creation.
The square was full. Ten new saints were canonised that morning — alongside Devasahayam, Pope Francis canonised nine others, including César de Bus, founder of the Fathers of Christian Doctrine; Luigi Maria Palazzolo, founder of the Sisters of the Poor; Giustino Maria Russolillo, founder of the Society of Divine Vocations; Charles de Foucauld, the French soldier turned hermit whose spirituality of presence among the poor has shaped generations of missionaries; and others. A diverse company, drawn from across the centuries and the nations — the universality of the Church made visible in ten lives given to ten specific forms of the same vocation.
Among them, the man from Kanyakumari. The man who had been a Hindu palace official. The man whose cause had taken 270 years to reach this square.
The Formula of Canonisation
At the moment of canonisation, Pope Francis spoke the ancient formula — the same formula spoken at every canonisation, unchanged in its essential structure across the centuries, the most solemn declaration the Church's magisterium makes:
"For the honour of the Blessed Trinity, the exaltation of the Catholic faith and the increase of the Christian life, by the authority of our Lord Jesus Christ, and of the Holy Apostles Peter and Paul, and our own, after due deliberation and frequent prayer for divine assistance, and having sought the counsel of our brother Bishops, we declare and define Blessed Devasahayam Pillai, Blessed César de Bus..."
— and the names of the ten continued —
"...to be Saints, and we enrol them in the Catalogue of Saints, and we establish that they shall be venerated as such by the whole Church."
We declare and define. Not we suggest or we believe or we hope. The Church speaks with the authority Christ gave Peter and Paul and their successors — the authority to bind and loose, to declare what has been accomplished by grace in a human life, to say with the full weight of the magisterium: this person is in the presence of God. This person can be invoked. This person's intercession reaches heaven.
We enrol them in the Catalogue of Saints. Devasahayam's name entered the universal calendar. Not the calendar of a diocese or a religious order or a region, but the universal calendar — the calendar of the whole Church, on which his feast of 14 January is now kept by Catholics everywhere.
We establish that they shall be venerated as such by the whole Church. Not only by the faithful of Kanyakumari, who had been venerating him since the day of his burial. By the whole Church. By Catholics in Europe and the Americas and Africa and Asia and the Pacific — by every Catholic in every country, to whom the Church now says: this man is your saint too. His intercession is available to you. Bring him your needs.
What Pope Francis Said
Pope Francis's homily on Pentecost Sunday 2022 addressed the feast and the canonisations in the way that his homilies characteristically address the Church: directly, pastorally, without the distance of academic theology, with the specific attention to the poor and the marginalized that has marked his entire pontificate.
He spoke about the Holy Spirit — the Spirit who blows where He wills, who cannot be controlled or predicted, who disrupts the comfortable arrangements of the world and of the Church with the same energy with which He disrupted the upper room on the first Pentecost. He spoke about the new saints as witnesses to the Spirit's work in every age and every corner of the world.
For Devasahayam specifically, Pope Francis named him as a model for the lay faithful — not only for the Indian Church, but for the universal Church. The lay vocation, lived in the world, carried into the structures of society, enacted at the table and in the marketplace and in the political community — this is the vocation whose model Devasahayam is. The Pope was saying, with the authority of his office, what the theology of Lumen Gentium and Christifideles Laici had been saying since the Council: the lay vocation is a real vocation, a complete vocation, a vocation capable of producing heroic sanctity. Here is the proof.
He spoke, as he has consistently spoken throughout his pontificate, about the saint who embraced the poor — who sat at table with the marginalized, who broke the social barriers of his world by the simple and radical act of treating every person as a person, who paid the price that the social order of Travancore extracted from those who challenged its categories. The commensality. The table. The radical hospitality that cost him his freedom and his life.
This is the image of Devasahayam that Francis placed before the universal Church: not primarily the palace official, not primarily the martyr in chains, but the man at table with everyone. The man whose Christianity was visible precisely in the way he ate, and with whom, and at whose invitation.
The Delegation from India
The Indian delegation in Saint Peter's Square that morning was large and visible and joyful in the specific way that South Indian Catholic communities are joyful — with colour and sound and the kind of physical expressiveness that the solemn liturgies of Rome do not always accommodate but that the Roman liturgy has always, at its best, known how to receive.
Bishops from the Diocese of Kottar and from the dioceses of Tamil Nadu and Kerala. Priests who had served in the parishes where the memory of Devasahayam had been kept alive across three centuries. Laypeople from the communities of Kanyakumari — from Nattalam where he was born, from Vadakkankulam where he was baptised, from Aralvaimozhi where he was imprisoned, from the pilgrimage routes that converge on Muttidichanparai.
They had waited 270 years for this. Or rather — the people who gathered in the square had not personally waited 270 years, but they were the inheritors of a waiting that had begun in 1752 with the Te Deum the bishop ordered to be sung across the churches of Kanyakumari when the bones and the incorrupt tongue were brought to Kottar, and that had continued through every petition and every pilgrimage and every novena and every cause document across the 270 years between the martyrdom and the morning in the square.
The waiting was over. Their man was on the altar.
What does it mean to the community that has kept the memory for three centuries — that has preserved the oral tradition, maintained the pilgrimages, sought the intercession, and persisted through two and a half centuries of process and petition and commission and investigation — to hear the Pope pronounce the formula? It means the thing that the Christian hope means when it is finally confirmed by the authority of the Church: we were right. The God we were praying to through this man's intercession was hearing us. The man we believed was in God's presence is in God's presence. The waiting was not wishful thinking. It was faith, and faith was not disappointed.
Live in Kanyakumari
While Pope Francis spoke in Saint Peter's Square, the faithful of Kanyakumari were watching on screens set up in churches and public spaces across the district. The cathedral at Kottar. The Holy Family Church at Vadakkankulam. The Shrine Church at Devasahayam Mount. The churches of Nattalam and Peruvilai and Puliyoorkurichi and every pilgrimage site associated with his life and his miracles.
They watched the formula pronounced. They heard the name — Beatum Devasahayam Pillai becoming Sanctum Devasahayam Pillai, Blessed becoming Saint — and the joy that met that moment in those churches was the joy of the community that had been closest to him for longest, the community that had maintained the memory before anyone in Rome had heard of him, the community that was, in the most literal sense available, his people.
The screens showed what was happening 9,000 kilometres away in Rome. And what was happening 9,000 kilometres away in Rome was, from the perspective of heaven — from the perspective of the saint whose canonisation was being declared — happening here, at the mountain and the font and the tomb and the shrine, as much as it was happening in the square.
The Church is one body. What is declared in Rome is declared everywhere the Body is. The canonisation did not happen to Kanyakumari from a distance. It happened in Kanyakumari, through the screens and through the prayer and through the joy that is the natural response of a community when the thing it has believed and hoped for and persisted in is confirmed by the full authority of the Church.
What Canonisation Does
The canonisation did not make Devasahayam a saint. He was already a saint — already in the presence of God, already interceding, already the man whose prayer God had been answering at Aralvaimozhi and at Puliyoorkurichi and at Peruvilai and in the womb of the woman whose child was healed. He had been a saint since the moment of his death on the mountain, or rather since his baptism opened in him the life of sanctifying grace that his martyrdom completed.
What the canonisation did was something different and something equally important: it declared what was already true. It made the private knowledge of the community — the knowledge preserved in three centuries of oral tradition and pilgrimage and intercession and answered prayer — into the public declaration of the universal Church. It moved Devasahayam from the category of we believe he is a saint to the category of the Church declares he is a saint — from the private faith of a community to the binding teaching of the magisterium.
And that declaration made something newly possible: the invocation of Saint Devasahayam by Catholics everywhere, not merely by the community that had known him first. The canonisation is the opening of the saint's intercession to the universal Church — the public announcement that this man can be invoked, that his intercession has been confirmed by the Church's highest authority, that Catholics in every country and every language and every century going forward are invited to bring him their needs.
The man who sat at table with everyone now has a table that extends across the whole world.
The Company He Keeps
One detail of the canonisation is worth holding: the company in which Devasahayam was canonised.
Charles de Foucauld — the French aristocrat who became a soldier who became an explorer who became a hermit who became a missionary among the Tuareg of the Sahara, who lived among the poorest of the poor in the Algerian desert, who was murdered at his hermitage in 1916. A layman for most of his adult life before his ordination. A man whose spirituality of presence — of being with the poor rather than doing things for the poor — has shaped more missionary communities than almost any other twentieth-century figure.
Placed alongside Devasahayam on the same day, in the same formula, on Pentecost Sunday 2022. Two men from entirely different worlds — a French aristocrat and an Indian palace official, a Saharan hermit and a South Indian martyr — canonised together by a pope from Argentina in a square in Rome, on the birthday of the Church.
The universality is the point. The Spirit blows where He wills. He blew in the Sahara and in the jungle at Aralvaimozhi. He blew in the language of a Dutch prisoner explaining Job to a Hindu court official and in the language of a French aristocrat stripping himself of everything to live among the Tuareg. He does not confine Himself to the expected forms or the expected places or the expected people.
He blows where He wills. And where He blows, He produces saints.
A Prayer on the Feast Day
The feast of Saint Devasahayam is 14 January. On that day each year, the Church reads his name from the calendar and the faithful of Kanyakumari climb the mountain and the bell-rock rings and the pilgrims kneel where he knelt and pray the prayer he prayed.
The prayer the whole Church prays with them:
O God, who gave your servant Devasahayam the grace to leave behind the attractions of this world and to embrace the way of the Cross, grant us also, we pray, through his intercession, that we may hold fast to Christ and obtain the glory of the resurrection.
Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, God, for ever and ever.
Amen.
And the prayer of the people of Kanyakumari, simpler and older than the liturgical text, the prayer that the community has prayed since before there was a feast day in the universal calendar:
Saint Devasahayam, pray for us.
Both prayers are right. Both prayers are heard.
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