ROMAN CATHOLIC, MADRAS
When the English first came to Madras, there were numerous Roman
Catholic churches in the neighbouring Portuguese settlement of San
Thome, but there were none within the tract of land that Mr. Francis
Day acquired in the Company's behalf. When, therefore, at the
Company's invitation, a number of Portuguese from San Thome, both
pure-blooded and mixed, came and settled down in the Company's White
Town, they were necessarily compelled to resort to the ministrations
of Portuguese priests who belonged to the San Thome Mission; and
within a year of the foundation of Fort St. George, the Portuguese
missionaries built a church in the outskirts of the British
settlement. This was the Church of the Assumption, which stands in
what is still called 'Portuguese Street' in Georgetown, and is
therefore a building of historic note. To the Company's
representatives the ministrations of Portuguese priests to residents
of Madras were objectionable; for the relations between Madras and San
Thome were by no means friendly. It is true that when Mr. Francis Day
was treating for the acquisition of a site, the Portuguese at Mylapore
had furthered his efforts; but such a mark of apparent good will was
no more than the outcome of Portuguese hostility to the Dutch; for
they hoped that the English at Madras would be powerful allies with
themselves against the aggressive Hollanders. As soon, however, as
Madras had begun to be built and English trade to be actively pushed,
jealousies arose and disagreements occurred; and the Company's
representatives chafed at the idea that Portuguese priests should be
the spiritual advisers of residents of Madras.
In 1642, when Madras was in its third year, a certain Father Ephraim,
a French Capuchin, chanced to set foot in Madras. Father Ephraim had
been sent out from Paris as a missionary to Pegu; and he had travelled
across India from Surat to Masulipatam, where, according to his
instructions, he was to have secured a passage to Pegu in one of the
Company's ships. His information was out of date; for the Agency had
lately been transferred from Masulipatam to Madras, and the Company's
ships for Pegu were sailing now from Madras instead of from
Masulipatam; so Father Ephraim journeyed southward from Masulipatam to
look for a vessel at the new settlement. At Madras no vessel was
starting immediately, and Father Ephraim had to bide his time.
Meanwhile he made himself useful by ministering to the Roman Catholics
of the place. Official and other documents show that Father Ephraim
was a very devout and a very able man. He was 'an earnest Christian,'
'a polished linguist,' able to converse in English, Portuguese and
Dutch, besides his own French, and he was conversant with Persian and
Arabic. He had the charm of attractive friendliness, which is so
common with Frenchmen, and he captivated all with whom he conversed.
The Portuguese and other Roman Catholic inhabitants of Madras, to whom
the Company's disapproval of the ministrations of Portuguese priests
had been a frequent source of trouble, formally petitioned Father
Ephraim to settle down in the city; and the Governor in Council,
greatly preferring a French priest to a Portuguese and thoroughly
approving of Father Ephraim personally, supported the petition with a
formal order that, if the priest would stay, a site would be provided
on which he might build a church for his flock. Father Ephraim himself
was not unwilling to stay, but he was under orders for Pegu, and,
furthermore, Madras was within the diocese of San Thome, and the
Bishop was not likely to approve of a scheme in which the
ministrations of his own priests would be set at naught in favour of a
stranger. The Company, however, was influential. A reference was made
to Father Ephraim's Capuchin superiors in Paris, and they approved of
his remaining in Madras; another reference was made to Rome, asking
that the British territory of Madras should be ecclesiastically
separated from the Portuguese diocese of Mylapore, and the Pope issued
a decree to that effect.
A site for a church, as also for a priest's house, was provided in
White Town, within the Fort St. George of to-day, and a small church,
dedicated to St. Andrew, was built; and for a good many years it was
the only church of any kind in the settlement.
The Portuguese ecclesiastics of Mylapore were never reconciled to this
ecclesiastical separation of Madras, and when Father Ephraim went by
invitation to Mylapore to discuss certain ecclesiastical business, he
was forthwith arrested, clapped in irons, and shipped off to Goa and
lodged in the prison of the Inquisition. The Governor of Fort St.
George took the matter in hand, but Father Ephraim was in prison more
than two years before he was eventually released and sent back to
Madras.
Later, Father Ephraim rebuilt St. Andrew's Church on a larger plan,
and the building was opened with ceremony; and Master Patrick Warner,
the Company's Protestant Chaplain at Fort St. George, complained
indignantly to the Directors in England that Governor Langhorn had
celebrated the popish occasion with the 'firing of great guns' and
with 'volleys of small shot by all the soldiers in garrison.'
Father Ephraim had already built a church in old Black Town, which
seems to have stood somewhere within what is now the site of the High
Court. Another French Capuchin had meanwhile come to Madras to help
him in his ministrations to his ever-increasing flock; so the church
in Black Town had its regular pastor.
After more than fifty years of self-sacrificing work in Madras, Father
Ephraim died of old age, sincerely esteemed by all who knew him.
Some years after his death St. Andrew's was again rebuilt, and it was
now a large edifice, with a high bell-tower, and a small churchyard
around. In the suburban district of Muthialpet there was also a
'Portuguese Burying Place,' which is now the 'compound' of the Roman
Catholic Cathedral and its associated buildings in Armenian Street;
and a small church stood within this enclosure. Adjoining the
Portuguese Burying Place was the 'Armenian Burying Place,' which is
now the enclosure of the Armenian church; and it was the Armenian
Burying Place that gave the name to the street.
When Madras was captured by the French, there were people who said
that the French priests in Madras had given information to their
countrymen; and three years later, when Madras was restored to the
Company, the Governor in Council confiscated St. Andrew's church. A
reference to the Directors in England as to what they were to do with
the confiscated building brought back the very decisive reply that
they were "immediately on the receipt of this, without fail to
demolish the Portuguese Church in the White Town at Madras, and not
suffer it to stand." The church was demolished accordingly, as also a
Roman Catholic chapel in Vepery. The church in old Black Town had
already been demolished by the French when they destroyed the greater
part of old Black Town itself; and, in accordance with another edict
of the Directors in England, by which the Company's representatives in
Madras were "absolutely forbid suffering any Romish Church within the
bounds, or even to suffer the public profession of the Romish
religion," Roman Catholicism was altogether scouted in Madras.
Twenty-five years later, the English troops, after defeating the
French in various engagements, captured Pondicherry and demolished its
fortifications; and the peace of Paris left the French in India
powerless. With the danger of French aggression removed for good, the
Company were less intolerant of the religion which Frenchmen
professed; and a few years later they paid the Capuchin priests some
Rs. 50,000 as compensation for the destruction of the church in White
Town and of the chapel in Vepery.
With funds thus in their hands, the Capuchin fathers set about
building a new church in the 'Burying Place.' This new church, which
they built in 1775, was the edifice which is now the Roman Catholic
Cathedral in Armenian Street. On the gate-posts appears the date 1642,
but this was the year in which the Company made a grant of the land
for a Roman Catholic Cemetery and in which Father Ephraim arrived and
the Madras Mission began, and is not the date of the building of the
present church or of its predecessor. The Capuchin missionaries
continued in charge of Roman Catholic affairs in Madras until 1832, in
which year they were put under episcopal jurisdiction.
Reference has been made in this chapter and elsewhere to the churches
that were already in existence in Mylapore when the English first
settled in Madras. According to local tradition, the Apostle St.
Thomas made his way to the East, and, after preaching in various parts
of India, settled down in the ancient Hindu town of Mylapore, where he
made numerous converts. The Hindu priests, indignant at the loss of so
many of their clients, sought the missionary's life. The Apostle,
according to the tradition, lived in a small cave on a small hill--the
'Little Mount'--fed by birds and drinking the water of a spring that
bubbled up miraculously within the cave. Driven from the cave, he
fled to another hill, a mile or so away--'St. Thomas's Mount'--where
he was killed with a lance. The dead body was buried at Mylapore. Such
is the story; and in the present-day church on the Little Mount the
visitor is shown a cave which is said to have been the Apostle's
hiding-place; and within the nave of the cathedral at Mylapore he is
shown a hole in the ground--now lined with marble--in which the
Martyr's remains are said to have been buried.
When the Portuguese came to Mylapore in the early part of the
sixteenth century, they built a church upon the ruins of an ancient
church that had enclosed the tomb; and the new church became
eventually the Cathedral of San Thome. The sixteenth century building
was pulled down in 1893, and the present Cathedral--a handsome Gothic
structure--was built. Mylapore is now a suburb of Madras, and is
within British dominion; but the bishopric, which was originally
supported by the King of Portugal, who had the right of nominating the
bishop, is still supported by the Portuguese Government.
Mylapore has a history of its own that is outside the scope of the
'Story of Madras;' but a few words about the glories of a city that is
now a suburb of Madras will not be out of place.
Mylapore and Madras, standing side by side, are a conjunction of the
old and the young. Mylapore, or Meliapore, the 'Peacock City' of the
ancient Hindu world, has existed for twenty centuries, and perhaps a
great many more; Madras has existed less than three. It was at
Mylapore that, according to tradition, the body of the martyred
Apostle St. Thomas was buried; Mylapore was the birth-place of
Tiruvalluvar, an old and illustrious Tamil author who belonged to the
down-trodden class, and of Peyalvar, an eminent Vaishnavite saint and
writer; it was here that a company of Saivaite saints, Appar and his
fellows, assembled together and wrote their well-known hymns; and it
was here also that Mastan, a renowned Mohammedan scholar, lived and
wrote and died.
Of the ancient glories of Mylapore no vestige remains; but several of
the churches of the Mylapore diocese belong to the sixteenth century,
including the celebrated 'Luz' Church, the Church of the Madre-de-Deus
at San Thome and the little Church of Our Lady of Refuge between
Mylapore and Saidapet, besides the churches at the Little Mount and
St. Thomas's Mount, of which the latter is a sixteenth-century
development of an old chapel that existed there before the coming of
the Portuguese.
It is of interest to note that there are those who say that a Mylapore
church gave its name to the city of Madras. They say--not, I believe,
without evidence--that the rural village of Madraspatam, where Mr.
Francis Day selected a site for the Company's settlement, had been
colonized by fisherfolk from the parish of the Madre-de-Deus
Church--the Church of the Mother of God--and that the emigrant
fisherfolk called their village by the name of their parish, and that
the name was eventually corrupted into 'Madras.' The origin of the
name 'Madras' is uncertain; and the explanation is at any rate
interesting and not unlikely to be true.