India Christian Pilgrimage Sites

1. What the India Pilgrimage Circuit Is

The Indian pilgrimage circuit is a set of shrines, most of them in the four southern states of Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka and Goa, that draw very large numbers of pilgrims on foot, by bus and by train. Christianity in India is ancient in the south and much younger in most of the north, and the map of the shrines follows that history exactly. A pilgrim who understands the three layers of that history can read almost any Indian church at a glance.

The first layer is the Saint Thomas tradition of the Malabar Coast, which holds that the apostle Thomas preached in India in the first century and died at Mylapore near modern Chennai. Out of it grew the community known as the Saint Thomas Christians, who worshipped in the East Syriac tradition for many centuries before any European arrived. Their shrines sit inland in Kerala and along the old spice ports.

The second layer is Portuguese. From the arrival of Vasco da Gama at Kappad near Calicut in 1498, and the establishment of Portuguese rule in Goa from 1510, Latin Catholicism arrived with its own religious orders, its own liturgy and a great deal of church building. Old Goa, Velankanni, Bandra in Mumbai and the coastal churches of Kanyakumari all belong to this layer, and so does the Portuguese pressure on the Saint Thomas Christians that produced the Synod of Diamper in 1599 and the Coonan Cross Oath of 1653.

The third layer is modern. British and continental missions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries planted Anglican, Lutheran, Baptist and Reformed congregations across the subcontinent, which in the twentieth century largely gathered into the Church of South India in 1947 and the Church of North India in 1970. In the same period the Catholic Church in India produced a set of canonised saints whose tombs are now pilgrim shrines in their own right, among them Alphonsa of Bharananganam, Kuriakose Elias Chavara, Euphrasia Eluvathingal, Mariam Thresia, Devasahayam Pillai and Teresa of Calcutta.

Two features of the Indian circuit surprise visitors from Europe. The first is the scale of the crowds. Velankanni and Mount Mary at Bandra draw very large numbers at their September feasts, and the crowds at an Indian Marian feast are on the scale of the great European shrines. The second is that the crowds are religiously mixed. Hindu and Muslim pilgrims come to Velankanni, to St Anthony's at Kochchikade in Colombo and to Mount Mary in large numbers, ask for the same favours, make the same vows and light the same candles. Indian shrine culture treats a place of proven prayer as open ground, and the Catholic custodians of these shrines welcome that without pretending it is the same thing as communion.

The theology underneath the practice is the ordinary Catholic theology of pilgrimage. The Catechism of the Catholic Church places pilgrimages among the expressions of popular piety that surround the sacramental life of the Church without replacing it (CCC 1674). A pilgrimage confers nothing automatically, and a journey to Velankanni is a devotional act freely undertaken. For the doctrine in full, see our guide to what a pilgrimage is and what it does, and for the wider map of the world's shrines see our overview of Christian pilgrimage sites.

2. Which Churches a Pilgrim Meets in India

India holds an unusual number of distinct historic churches within one country, and several of them descend from the same ancient community. A pilgrim who walks into a church in Kerala may be in a Catholic church of the Syro-Malabar tradition, a Catholic church of the Latin tradition, an Oriental Orthodox church, a church of the Assyrian tradition or a Reformed church of the Mar Thoma line, and the buildings can look similar from the road.

The Catholic Churches

Three churches in full communion with Rome operate in India, each with its own hierarchy, liturgy and canon law. The Latin Church covers most of the country and traces its Indian presence to the Portuguese and to later missionary orders. The Syro-Malabar Church, with its major archiepiscopal see at Ernakulam-Angamaly, is the larger of the two Eastern Catholic churches, worships in the East Syriac tradition and descends directly from the Saint Thomas Christians who entered communion with Rome after the Portuguese period. The Syro-Malankara Catholic Church, with its see at Trivandrum, worships in the West Syriac tradition and came into communion with Rome in 1930 under Mar Ivanios, from the Malankara Orthodox side. Our guides to the Syro-Malabar Church and to the Eastern Catholic churches set out how these bodies are governed.

The Orthodox and Assyrian Churches

The Malankara Orthodox Syrian Church and the Jacobite Syrian Christian Church both belong to the Oriental Orthodox family, worship in the West Syriac tradition, and are separated from each other by a long dispute over autocephaly and the authority of the Syriac Orthodox Patriarch of Antioch. They are not in communion with the Eastern Orthodox churches of Greece, Russia and the Middle East, and the distinction matters: the Oriental Orthodox did not receive the Council of Chalcedon in 451, and the two families remain separate bodies. Our guide to the Oriental Orthodox churches explains the difference, and our guide to the Syriac Orthodox Church covers the Antiochene patriarchate the Jacobite party looks to. Alongside them the Chaldean Syrian Church of Thrissur belongs to the Assyrian Church of the East, a separate tradition again.

The Reformed and Protestant Churches

The Malankara Mar Thoma Syrian Church emerged from a nineteenth century reform movement within the Malankara community, keeps the West Syriac liturgy in a revised form, and is in full communion with the Anglican churches. Its annual Maramon Convention on the sandbed of the Pamba river in February is described by the Mar Thoma Church as one of the largest Christian gatherings in Asia. The Church of South India, formed in 1947 by a union of Anglican, Methodist, Congregational, Presbyterian and Reformed bodies, and the Church of North India, formed on similar lines in 1970, hold the great cathedrals of the British period, including St George's in Chennai and the CNI cathedrals of Kolkata and Mumbai. Our guide to Anglicanism covers the tradition they came out of.

The practical consequence for a pilgrim is that hospitality is generous and communion is not automatic. A Catholic visitor is welcome at an Orthodox liturgy in Kerala and should not present themselves for communion there, and the same restraint runs the other way. Our guide to ecumenism and what it has and has not settled covers the state of the dialogues.

3. The Saint Thomas Tradition and What Stands Behind It

The Saint Thomas tradition holds that the apostle Thomas came to India, preached along the Malabar Coast from about the year 52, founded a series of churches, crossed to the Coromandel Coast and was killed at Mylapore near modern Chennai in about the year 72. The tradition is very old, it is held firmly by the Saint Thomas Christians as their own origin story, and popes have spoken of it with respect. Historians distinguish between the strength of the tradition and the strength of the documentary evidence for it, and an honest guide should do the same.

What the Ancient Sources Say

The earliest connected narrative is the Acts of Thomas, a Syriac work usually dated to the third century and written in Edessa. It describes the apostle being sent to India, working as a carpenter for a king named Gundaphorus, and being martyred there. The text is apocryphal and carries clear Gnostic colouring in places, so the Church has never received it as Scripture, and no historian reads it as a straight report. One detail in it turned out to be striking: the name Gundaphorus corresponds to Gondophares, an Indo-Parthian king attested in coins and in the Takht-i-Bahi inscription, whose reign falls in the first century. The correspondence stops short of proving the story, and it places the narrative in a first century political landscape that really existed.

Other early witnesses are shorter. Origen, as reported by Eusebius in the Ecclesiastical History, assigns Parthia to Thomas. Ephrem the Syrian, writing in the fourth century, sings of the apostle's bones being brought from India to Edessa. Gregory of Tours in the sixth century repeats the account of the tomb in India and the transfer of relics. From the Indian side, the community's own liturgical songs, the Rabban Pattu and the Margam Kali Pattu, carry the tradition in verse, and the community's memory of it is continuous.

The Acts of Thomas survives in Syriac and Greek and is published in the standard collections of New Testament apocrypha. The identification of Gundaphorus with the Indo-Parthian king Gondophares rests on numismatic and epigraphic evidence discussed in the standard studies of Indo-Parthian history. Dates for the apostle's arrival and death given here are those the tradition itself gives, and the Church has never defined them.

What Is Not in Dispute

Two things are settled. First, trade between the Roman Mediterranean and the Malabar Coast was routine in the first century. The monsoon route across the Arabian Sea was well known, the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea describes the ports, and Roman coin hoards have been found in south India. A first century traveller from the Near East to Kerala is entirely ordinary. Second, an organised Christian community with East Syriac liturgy and bishops sent from the Church of the East existed in Kerala long before any European arrived. Cosmas Indicopleustes describes Christians in Malabar and in Sri Lanka in the sixth century, and Indian copper plate grants of the ninth century record privileges given to Christian merchant communities.

The Catholic position is that the tradition is ancient, venerable and permitted, and that it is not a defined article of faith. Pilgrims who go to Mylapore are venerating a tomb the Indian Church has honoured as the apostle's for as long as its records go back. That is enough for devotion. It does not require anyone to pretend the archaeology settles it.

Where the Relics Are

The bulk of the relics left India early. The tradition, supported by Ephrem and by Gregory of Tours, is that the apostle's remains were carried from Mylapore to Edessa in Mesopotamia. From Edessa they went to the island of Chios, and from Chios they were taken in 1258 to Ortona on the Adriatic coast of Italy, where the cathedral holds them still. Mylapore keeps a portion and venerates the site of the burial. A hand relic was returned to India in the twentieth century. The pattern is the ordinary one for apostolic relics, and it is the same pattern our guides to St Peter's Basilica and to Santiago de Compostela describe elsewhere.

4. San Thome and the Two Mounts of Chennai

San Thome Basilica stands in Mylapore in the city of Chennai, over the tomb venerated as that of the apostle Thomas. The present church is a white neo-Gothic building with a tall spire, put up by the British in 1896 on the site of the Portuguese church of 1523, which itself replaced an earlier structure the Portuguese found on their arrival. Pope Pius XII raised it to the rank of a minor basilica in 1956, and the underground tomb chapel beneath the sanctuary is open to pilgrims.

The shrine describes itself as one of a small number of churches in the world built over the burial place of an apostle. Comparable claims are made for St Peter's in Rome and for Santiago de Compostela. We report the claim as the shrine makes it rather than as an independently verified count.

The Tomb Chapel and the Museum

The tomb chapel lies below the main floor and is reached by steps from the side of the sanctuary. It holds the sepulchre, a small altar and a place to kneel. Above ground the basilica keeps a museum with Portuguese period stones, one of which carries a Persian cross with a Pahlavi inscription of a kind found at several south Indian sites and generally dated between the sixth and ninth centuries. Those crosses are among the oldest surviving Christian artefacts in India, and they matter more historically than any of the later architecture, because they are physical evidence of an East Syriac Christian presence on the coast long before the Portuguese.

St Thomas Mount

St Thomas Mount, called Parangi Malai locally, is a hill about eleven kilometres inland, traditionally identified as the place of the apostle's death. A flight of stone steps climbs to the summit chapel of Our Lady of Expectation, built by the Portuguese in 1523. The chapel holds a stone cross said to have been carved by the apostle, and a painting of the Virgin attributed by tradition to St Luke. Both attributions are devotional traditions rather than established facts, and the shrine presents them as such. The view over the city from the summit is the reason many pilgrims climb it at dawn.

Little Mount

Little Mount, or Chinna Malai, lies between the basilica and the larger hill. Its cave is venerated as the place where the apostle prayed and hid from those seeking his life, with a spring nearby that pilgrims associate with him. A Portuguese chapel of 1551 sits over the cave, and a large modern circular church stands beside it. The three sites, basilica, Little Mount and St Thomas Mount, form a compact pilgrimage that can be walked and driven in a single day, and Indian pilgrim groups usually take them in that order.

5. The Seven and a Half Churches of the Saint Thomas Christians

The seven and a half churches, called Ezharappallikal in Malayalam, are the communities the Saint Thomas Christians hold to have been founded by the apostle himself along the Kerala coast and its backwaters. The number is traditional, the lists vary slightly between sources, and each site now carries a church of considerable age standing on ground the community has used for many centuries. Pilgrims in Kerala often make the whole set as a single circuit over several days.

The Usual List

The seven most commonly named are Kodungallur, also called Cranganore, near the ancient port of Muziris where the tradition places the landing; Kollam, the old spice port of Quilon on the southern coast; Niranam in Pathanamthitta district; Nilackal, also called Chayal, in the hills of the interior; Kokkamangalam on the backwaters of Alappuzha; Kottakkavu at North Paravur near Kochi; and Palayoor in Thrissur district. The half church is generally identified with Thiruvithamcode, the Arappally, in Kanyakumari district in Tamil Nadu, and it is counted as a half because the tradition treats it as a later or partial foundation.

Lists of the seven and a half churches differ between the traditions of the several Kerala churches, and some substitute Aruvithura or Malayattoor for one of the names above. The list given here is the one most commonly printed by the Kerala dioceses. The dating of the individual foundations rests on community tradition rather than on excavation.

Why They Are Divided Between Churches Today

The eight sites now belong to different churches, and the reason is the seventeenth century split. Portuguese authorities imposed Latin practice on the Saint Thomas Christians through the Synod of Diamper in 1599, which subordinated their bishops, revised their liturgy and burned Syriac books. Resentment came to a head in 1653 at Mattancherry, where a crowd tied ropes to a stone cross and swore an oath against Portuguese jurisdiction, an event remembered as the Coonan Cross Oath. Part of the community returned to communion with Rome and became the Syro-Malabar Church. The rest went their own way and, through a long series of contacts with the Syriac Orthodox Patriarchate of Antioch, adopted the West Syriac tradition and became the ancestors of the Malankara churches. A single ancient community produced the several Kerala churches a pilgrim meets today.

The practical effect on a pilgrimage is that visiting all eight means being a guest in three or four different churches in one week. That is a good discipline. It teaches more about the actual state of Christian division than any book, and Kerala hospitality makes it easy.

6. Malayattoor and the Climb up Kurisumudi

Malayattoor is a hill shrine on the east bank of the Periyar river in Ernakulam district, Kerala, and its pilgrimage is a climb. The summit, called Kurisumudi, the mountain of the cross, stands about six hundred metres above the plain, and pilgrims walk up a stone and earth path of several kilometres through rubber and cashew country, many of them barefoot, calling out the shrine's cry of Ponnum Kurisu Muthappa as they go. The tradition holds that the apostle Thomas prayed on the summit and left the imprint of his footprints and a cross in the rock.

The Feast Season

The great pilgrimage falls after Easter. The Malayattoor Perunnal begins on the first Sunday after Easter and runs through the following week, and in that season the path is continuously full, day and night, with families, parish groups and men carrying wooden crosses. Pilgrims of other religions climb alongside Christians. Vows are common, and so is the practice of climbing barefoot as a penance or in thanksgiving for a favour received.

The Pontifical Council for the Pastoral Care of Migrants and Itinerant People recognised Malayattoor as an international shrine in 2004, one of a small number of Asian sites given that designation. The shrine belongs to the Syro-Malabar Archeparchy of Ernakulam-Angamaly, and the liturgy at the summit is celebrated in the East Syriac tradition in Malayalam.

The 2004 international shrine designation is published by the shrine and by the Syro-Malabar Church. The height of Kurisumudi and the length of the path are given as approximations, since the several approach routes differ.

What the Climb Is Actually Like

The path is steep in sections and loose underfoot in others, and the Kerala heat is humid rather than dry. Pilgrims usually start before dawn or in the late afternoon. Water is sold along the route, shade is intermittent, and the last stretch to the chapel is the hardest. At the top there is a church, an open assembly ground, the venerated footprint, and a long view back down the Periyar valley. Most pilgrims stay for Mass and come down in the cool of the evening.

7. Kuravilangad and the Marian Tradition of Kerala

Kuravilangad, in Kottayam district, holds the Marth Mariam Forane Church, one of the oldest Marian centres of the Saint Thomas Christians. The local tradition is that the Virgin appeared to children at a spring in the fourth century and asked that a church be built, and the community has kept a Marian devotion there continuously since. The church is Syro-Malabar, and Our Lady is known there as Muthiyamma, a Malayalam title of affection for an elder mother.

What the Church Has and Has Not Declared

No apparition decree stands behind Kuravilangad. What stands behind it is very long established public devotion, which is a different kind of warrant and a real one. This matters because the framework changed recently. On 17 May 2024 the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith published the Norms for Proceeding in the Discernment of Alleged Supernatural Phenomena, and under those norms the Church ordinarily does not declare an apparition supernatural at all. Six conclusions are possible, of which the usual positive one is a nihil obstat, permitting devotion while leaving the question of supernatural origin open. Our guide to how the Church judges Marian apparitions sets out all six and the status of the major sites.

Applied to Kuravilangad, the honest statement is this: the devotion is ancient and permitted, the tradition of a fourth century apparition is held locally, and no ecclesiastical decree has ever declared that apparition supernatural. Pilgrims should hold it exactly that way. The same holds for the origin traditions at Velankanni and at Bandra.

The Bell and the Spring

The church keeps a large bronze bell of considerable age, known locally as the Muthiyamma bell, which the community treats as one of its treasures. The spring associated with the tradition is in the church compound and pilgrims draw water from it. The principal feast is on 8 September, the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary, which is the same date as the Velankanni feast and falls just before the Bandra octave, so 8 September carries Marian crowds across the whole country.

Other Kerala Marian Centres

Kerala carries several more Marian churches that draw regional pilgrimage. Vallarpadam near Kochi, the shrine of Our Lady of Ransom, is associated with an eighteenth century deliverance at sea, and the Church later gave it the rank of a minor basilica. Manarcaud near Kottayam, a Jacobite Syrian church, keeps the Ettu Nombu, the eight day Marian fast leading to 8 September, which draws very large crowds. Aruvithura, Edappally and Puthenchira all carry old Marian foundations. The pattern across all of them is the same: a titular feast, a preparatory novena or fast, a procession, and a great deal of food.

8. Bharananganam, St Alphonsa and the Kerala Saints

Bharananganam, a village in Kottayam district on the bank of the Meenachil river, holds the tomb of St Alphonsa, the first woman of Indian origin to be canonised. The tomb is in a chapel beside St Mary's Forane Church, and it draws pilgrims from across Kerala and far beyond it. The shrine is Syro-Malabar and the atmosphere is domestic rather than monumental.

Who She Was

Alphonsa Muttathupadathu was born Annakutty at Kudamaloor in 1910, lost her mother in infancy, and was raised by an aunt. As a girl she deliberately injured herself to make herself unmarriageable and free to enter religious life, an episode her biographers report and which the Church has never held up as a model. She joined the Franciscan Clarist Congregation, took the name Alphonsa after Alphonsus Liguori, and spent her adult life at Bharananganam as a teacher, in almost continuous illness, dying there on 28 July 1946, three weeks short of her thirty sixth birthday. Her writings are slight. Her cult began among schoolchildren at the convent immediately after her death.

Pope John Paul II beatified her at Kottayam on 8 February 1986, during his visit to India, and Pope Benedict XVI canonised her in Rome on 12 October 2008. Her feast is 28 July. The shrine keeps the small room where she lived and the objects she used, and the crowds at the July feast fill the village.

The Kerala Saints Circuit

Bharananganam sits inside a cluster of tombs that pilgrims commonly take together over two or three days, since they lie within an hour or two of each other in central Kerala.

Canonisation dates and the names of the popes who performed them are taken from the published acts of the Holy See. Feast days are those assigned in the proper calendars of the Indian churches, and a local calendar may keep a different day.

Kuriakose Elias Chavara, a priest of the Saint Thomas Christian community, co-founded in the nineteenth century the congregations the Syro-Malabar Church records as the first indigenous religious congregations of men and of women in India, set up a printing press and pushed hard for parish schools. Devasahayam Pillai is a distinct case: an eighteenth century Hindu convert of the Nair community in the kingdom of Travancore, put to death in 1752, and the first Indian layman to be canonised. His canonisation matters to Indian Christians because it honours a layman and a convert rather than a founder of an order. Our wider guide to what the Church means by a saint explains the process behind these acts.

9. Velankanni and Our Lady of Good Health

Velankanni, on the Coromandel coast of Tamil Nadu in Nagapattinam district, is commonly described by the Indian dioceses as the country's principal Christian pilgrimage centre. The Basilica of Our Lady of Good Health, a white Gothic revival church with red trim standing a short walk from the beach, draws pilgrims all year and immense crowds at the September feast. Pope John XXIII raised the shrine to the rank of a minor basilica in 1962. Indian pilgrims often call it the Lourdes of the East, a popular nickname rather than a title conferred by the Church.

The Three Traditions

The shrine's origin rests on three stories, all of them from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and all of them held as local tradition. In the first, a shepherd boy carrying milk to a customer met a lady with a child near a pond, gave her milk at her request, and found on arrival that his pot was still full. In the second, a lame boy selling buttermilk met the same lady, was told to find a Catholic gentleman and ask for a chapel, and stood up healed. In the third, Portuguese sailors caught in a storm in the Bay of Bengal vowed to build a church if they survived, came ashore at Velankanni on 8 September, and built the first chapel in fulfilment of the vow. The 8 September date is the reason the shrine's feast falls on the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary.

No apparition decree has been issued for Velankanni, and the Church has made no declaration that these events were supernatural. What the Church has done is approve and encourage the devotion, and papal acts have honoured the shrine, the basilica designation of 1962 among them. Read against the 2024 norms described in our guide to the Church's judgement on Marian apparitions, that is a settled and ordinary position: a permitted and encouraged devotion, with the question of supernatural origin left where the Church leaves it.

The Feast and the Novena

The feast is on 8 September and it is preceded by an eleven day novena that begins on 29 August with the raising of the shrine flag. In that period the roads into Velankanni fill with pilgrims walking from towns across Tamil Nadu, Kerala and Andhra Pradesh, many of them barefoot, many carrying the orange and white robes worn as a pilgrim habit. Pilgrims sleep in the shrine grounds and on the beach. Hindus and Muslims come in large numbers and take part in the same practices, and the shrine has never made a religious test a condition of entry.

The Practices

Velankanni has a strong culture of the votive offering. Pilgrims commonly have their heads shaved as a sign of a vow fulfilled, a practice borrowed from the wider Indian religious world and permitted here. They present small silver or tin plaques shaped like the part of the body they are asking to have healed, or like a house, a child or a boat. They take water from the shrine tank and oil from the lamps. They walk the last kilometres barefoot. The Church allows all of this as popular piety while insisting that grace comes from God through Christ and that no object works automatically, which is the same line the Catechism takes on popular devotion generally (CCC 1674 to 1676).

Getting the Shape of the Visit Right

Velankanni rewards patience. The basilica has an upper and a lower church and a separate large hall for the crowds, there is a Way of the Cross along the approach, a shrine museum of offerings, and the beach where the sailors are said to have landed. Confession and Mass are offered in several languages, Tamil, Malayalam, Telugu, Hindi and English among them. Most pilgrims stay at least one night, because the shrine at four in the morning is a different place from the shrine at noon.

10. Old Goa and the Body of Francis Xavier

Old Goa is a small settlement on the Mandovi river that was once the capital of Portuguese India and is now a field of great churches with almost no city left around them. The Basilica of Bom Jesus holds the body of St Francis Xavier, the Navarrese Jesuit who worked in India, the Malay archipelago and Japan and died in 1552 within sight of the Chinese coast. UNESCO inscribed the churches and convents of Goa on the World Heritage List in 1986, and the site is the reason Goa appears on every Indian pilgrimage itinerary.

Francis Xavier and How His Body Came Here

Francisco de Jasso y Azpilicueta was born in Navarre in 1506, met Ignatius of Loyola in Paris, and was one of the first companions who took vows at Montmartre in 1534. Sent east under Portuguese patronage, he reached Goa in 1542, worked among the pearl fishing communities of the Coromandel coast, went on to Malacca, the Moluccas and Japan, and died on 3 December 1552 on the island of Shangchuan while waiting for passage into China. His body was buried in quicklime, exhumed, taken to Malacca and then brought to Goa in 1554, where it has remained. Our guide to St Ignatius of Loyola and the founding of the Jesuits covers the order he belonged to.

The body was found to be substantially incorrupt in the early exhumations, and that finding, along with the missionary record, drove the cult. Four centuries of exposition, of pilgrims touching and in some documented cases removing portions, and of the Goan climate have taken their toll, and what is displayed today is the remains of a body in a silver casket rather than an unchanged one. The shrine says as much. Our guide to how the Church investigates miracles explains the standard the Church applies to claims of this kind.

The Basilica of Bom Jesus

The basilica was begun in 1594 and consecrated in 1605, and it is built of laterite with a facade of black granite, now stripped of its plaster, which gives it the dark weathered look visitors remember. Inside, the nave is plain and the eye goes to the gilded main altar of the Infant Jesus and to the tomb on the south side. The tomb structure was a gift of Cosimo III de' Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany, designed by the Florentine sculptor Giovanni Battista Foggini and completed at the end of the seventeenth century. It carries bronze panels of scenes from the saint's life and supports the silver casket made by Goan silversmiths.

The relics are exposed for public veneration at intervals of roughly ten years, in an event the Goan Church calls the Exposition, which draws very large numbers over several weeks. The most recent exposition ran from November 2024 into January 2025. Between expositions the casket rests above the tomb and pilgrims venerate it from the floor of the church. The feast of St Francis Xavier falls on 3 December and is a public occasion across Goa.

The 1986 UNESCO inscription of the Churches and Convents of Goa is published in the World Heritage List. Dates for the basilica's construction and for the Foggini tomb follow the shrine's own published history and the standard architectural surveys of Portuguese India.

The Other Churches of Old Goa

Bom Jesus is one building in a group, and a pilgrim who visits only the basilica has seen a fraction of the site. Across the road stands the Sé Cathedral, dedicated to St Catherine of Alexandria, one of the largest churches in Asia, with a single surviving bell tower and the Golden Bell inside it, and the Cross of Miracles in a side chapel. Beside it the Church of St Francis of Assisi holds Franciscan work and a small archaeological museum. The Church of Our Lady of the Rosary on the ridge is the oldest of them, built in the 1540s, and Francis Xavier is said to have preached there. The Church of St Cajetan follows a Roman model. The Tower of St Augustine is all that stands of a great ruined church on the hill, and the convent of Santa Monica beside it now houses a museum of Christian art.

Goa Beyond Old Goa

Two other Goan sites belong on a pilgrimage. The Church of Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception in Panjim, with its famous zigzag staircase, is the parish church of the modern capital. Sancoale, in Mormugao, is the birthplace of Joseph Vaz, the Goan Oratorian who went in disguise into Dutch controlled Ceylon in 1687 and rebuilt the Catholic Church there. Pope Francis canonised him at Colombo on 14 January 2015, and his cult ties the Goan and Sri Lankan halves of this page together.

11. Mount Mary Bandra and the Shrines of Mumbai

Mount Mary at Bandra is the Marian shrine of Mumbai, standing on a low hill above the Arabian Sea in the suburb of Bandra West. The church is dedicated to Our Lady of the Mount and holds a wooden statue of the Virgin with the Child that Portuguese Jesuits are said to have brought to the site in the sixteenth century. The present building dates from 1904, replacing earlier chapels destroyed and rebuilt across three centuries of Portuguese, Maratha and British history on this coast.

The Bandra Fair

The shrine's feast is the Bandra Fair, which opens on the Sunday following 8 September and runs for a week. The steps and the road up to the church fill with stalls selling wax offerings shaped as limbs, houses, boats, children and hearts, and pilgrims buy a candle in the shape of what they are praying about and offer it. Mumbai comes in enormous numbers, Christian and Hindu and Muslim together, and the fair is one of the city's major public events. Outside the fair the shrine keeps a Wednesday devotion and a steady stream of visitors, and the view of the sea from the terrace is the reason many of them stay a while.

The origin traditions of the statue vary in the telling. Some accounts say it was brought by Jesuits from Portugal, others that it was recovered from the sea by fishermen, and the Koli fishing community of Bandra has its own version. The Church has issued no apparition decree here, and none is claimed. The devotion is old, permitted and popular.

The Other Mumbai Shrines

St Michael's Church at Mahim runs the Wednesday novena to Our Lady of Perpetual Help, begun there in 1948, which spread from Mahim across the Catholic world of India and still fills the church and the street outside it every Wednesday. Mount Carmel's Church at Bandra and St Andrew's Church, a Portuguese foundation of the sixteenth century, are the other Bandra landmarks, and St Thomas Cathedral in the Fort area, consecrated in 1718, is the oldest surviving British period church in the city and belongs to the Church of North India. Between them these buildings tell the whole story of Christian Mumbai: Portuguese coastal parishes, a Redemptorist devotion that became an Indian institution, and an East India Company cathedral.

12. The Mother House in Kolkata

The Mother House of the Missionaries of Charity on Acharya Jagadish Chandra Bose Road in Kolkata holds the tomb of St Teresa of Calcutta, and it draws a steady stream of pilgrims from India and from abroad. The building is a plain working convent rather than a monument. Pilgrims walk in off a loud street, cross a small courtyard, and find the tomb in a bare ground floor room with a simple slab, flowers arranged on it in a changing pattern of words, and sisters and visitors praying on the floor around it.

What Is There

Beside the tomb room a small museum keeps her sari, her sandals, her bowl, her crucifix and letters in her handwriting. The room where she lived and worked is preserved upstairs, and it is very small. Mass is celebrated in the house chapel and visitors are received. The house is a functioning headquarters of a congregation working in many countries, so the atmosphere is one of ordinary religious life continuing around the shrine.

Two other sites in the city belong to the same pilgrimage. Nirmal Hriday, the home for the dying at Kalighat, sits beside the Kali temple in a building given to the sisters by the municipality in 1952, and it is the place the work began in its recognisable form. Shishu Bhavan, the children's home, is near the Mother House. Volunteers are received at both, and the sisters set the terms.

The Saint Herself

Anjezë Gonxhe Bojaxhiu was born in Skopje in 1910 to an Albanian family, joined the Loreto Sisters, came to India in 1929 and taught at Entally in Calcutta for nearly twenty years before leaving the convent in 1948 to work in the slums. She founded the Missionaries of Charity in 1950. Pope John Paul II beatified her on 19 October 2003 and Pope Francis canonised her on 4 September 2016. Her private letters, published after her death, disclose decades of interior darkness in which she felt no consolation and continued the work regardless. Our full guide to St Mother Teresa and the dark night she wrote about takes that up in detail, including the criticisms made of her work and what the record supports.

Other Kolkata Sites

St Paul's Cathedral, consecrated in 1847, is the Church of North India cathedral of the city, and it describes itself as the first cathedral built in Britain's overseas territories. The Armenian Church of the Holy Nazareth in the old trading quarter dates from 1724 and serves a small remaining Armenian community whose merchants were established in Bengal before the British. Both belong on a walk through Christian Kolkata.

13. Beyond the South: Bandel, Sardhana and the Orthodox Shrines

Christian pilgrimage in India is concentrated in the south, and three or four sites elsewhere carry substantial regional pilgrimage. They are worth knowing about because they show that the pattern of the coastal shrines was reproduced inland wherever a Christian community established itself.

Bandel, West Bengal

The Basilica of the Holy Rosary at Bandel on the Hooghly river, north of Kolkata, grew out of a Portuguese settlement founded at the end of the sixteenth century. The church was destroyed when the Mughal forces took the settlement in 1632 and rebuilt in 1660, and it keeps the statue of Our Lady of Happy Voyage together with a ship's mast presented by a captain in thanksgiving for surviving a storm. It was raised to the rank of a minor basilica by Pope John Paul II. The great feast falls in November and draws pilgrims from across Bengal.

Sardhana, Uttar Pradesh

The Basilica of Our Lady of Graces at Sardhana, near Meerut, was built in 1822 by Begum Samru, a woman of Kashmiri descent who ruled the principality of Sardhana, converted to Catholicism and commissioned a large neoclassical church from an Italian architect. It was later raised to the rank of a minor basilica and it is the principal Marian pilgrimage of north India, with its main feast in November.

The Orthodox Shrines of Kerala

Two Kerala tombs draw pilgrimage on the same scale as the Catholic shrines and belong to the Oriental Orthodox churches. Parumala, on an island in the Pamba river, holds the tomb of Geevarghese Mar Gregorios, the bishop known as the Parumala Thirumeni, who died in 1902 and was declared a saint by the Malankara Orthodox Syrian Church in 1947. The Parumala Perunnal at the beginning of November fills the island. Manjinikkara, in Pathanamthitta district, holds the tomb of Ignatius Elias III, the Syriac Orthodox Patriarch of Antioch who died in Kerala in 1932 while attempting to reconcile the two Malankara factions, and the Manjinikkara Perunnal in February is the great feast of the Jacobite Syrian Christian Church.

Catholic pilgrims are welcome at both, and both are Oriental Orthodox rather than Eastern Orthodox, which is a real distinction with real consequences: the Oriental Orthodox churches did not receive the Council of Chalcedon in 451 and are a separate communion from the Greek, Russian and other Chalcedonian Orthodox churches. Our guide to the Oriental Orthodox churches explains what divides and what unites them, and our guide to Orthodox monastery pilgrimage covers the Chalcedonian side.

The North East and the Himalaya

The north eastern states, above all Nagaland, Mizoram and Meghalaya, have very high Christian populations produced by nineteenth and twentieth century Baptist and Presbyterian missions, and their Christianity is congregational rather than shrine centred. There is no pilgrimage circuit there in the sense this page uses the word, and pilgrims looking for one will find church conventions and large assemblies instead of tombs and relics.

14. The Sri Lankan Shrines

Sri Lanka carries four major Catholic shrines, and Indian pilgrims have gone to them and Sri Lankan pilgrims have come to Velankanni for centuries, so the two circuits work as one. The Catholic Church in Sri Lanka is largely a Portuguese and Oratorian foundation, it survived a period of Dutch Calvinist suppression underground, and it was rebuilt by Joseph Vaz, the Goan priest canonised in Colombo in 2015.

Madhu

The Shrine of Our Lady of Madhu stands in the forest of Mannar district in the north west. Its statue was carried there in 1670 by Catholics fleeing Dutch persecution on the coast, and the shrine grew up around it in the jungle. Madhu is the national Marian shrine of Sri Lanka and its great feast is on 15 August, the Assumption. Its recent history is bound up with the civil war: the shrine lay in contested territory, the statue was moved for safety, and the site became a refuge for displaced people of every community. Pope Francis visited Madhu on 14 January 2015 and prayed there for reconciliation, and the shrine is now understood in Sri Lanka as a place where Tamil and Sinhala Catholics pray together.

Kochchikade

St Anthony's Shrine at Kochchikade in Colombo is a city church on the harbour front with a very large following among people of all religions, who come for the Tuesday devotion to St Anthony of Padua. It grew from the ministry of a priest who served the fishing community there in the eighteenth century. The shrine was one of the churches attacked in the coordinated bombings of Easter Sunday, 21 April 2019, in which many worshippers were killed during Mass, and it has been repaired and reopened. Our guide to St Anthony of Padua and why people ask him for lost things covers the devotion itself.

Talawila

St Anne's Church at Talawila stands on the coast of the Kalpitiya peninsula in Puttalam district, on a stretch of sand and scrub facing the sea. It keeps two great feasts, one in March and the principal one at the end of July around the feast of St Anne on 26 July, and pilgrims camp on the shore for days. The Talawila festival is one of the largest of the Sri Lankan coastal pilgrimages and it has a strong tradition of vows and thanksgiving offerings.

Tewatte

The National Basilica of Our Lady of Lanka at Tewatte, near Ragama outside Colombo, was built in fulfilment of a vow made during the Second World War, when the Archbishop of Colombo promised a shrine to Our Lady if the island were spared from invasion and bombardment. It was completed after the war and raised to the rank of a basilica, and it is the national shrine where the Sri Lankan bishops gather for national occasions. The building mixes European basilica planning with Sri Lankan architectural detail, and the grounds are large and quiet.

15. How the Circuit Fits Together

The Indian sites do not form a single line the way the Camino does, and a pilgrim has to choose a region. Three groupings cover almost everything, and each of them works as a self contained pilgrimage of about a week.

The Kerala and Tamil Nadu Circuit

The densest of the three. Start at Chennai for San Thome, Little Mount and St Thomas Mount, run down the Coromandel coast to Velankanni, cross west into Kerala for Bharananganam, Kuravilangad, Mannanam and the Kottayam cluster, then north to Malayattoor, Kottakkavu and Palayoor. This route takes in the Thomas tradition, the great Marian shrine, the tombs of the Indian saints and the seven and a half churches, and it can be done by train and bus throughout.

The Goa Circuit

Short and concentrated. Old Goa can be walked in a day, Panjim and Sancoale add a second, and the beaches and Portuguese village churches of Salcete fill a third. Pilgrims frequently attach Goa to a Kerala trip, since the coastal railway connects them directly.

The Northern Sites

Kolkata for the Mother House, Nirmal Hriday and the Bandel basilica up the Hooghly; Mumbai for Mount Mary and Mahim; Sardhana for the north Indian Marian shrine. These are city visits rather than a route, and most pilgrims take them alongside other travel.

Seasons and Feasts

The Indian pilgrimage year has fixed peaks, and a pilgrim who wants the full atmosphere goes to a feast, while a pilgrim who wants quiet prayer goes at any other time.

Feast dates are those published in the calendars of the Indian and Sri Lankan churches. Movable feasts follow Easter and shift each year. This page carries no travel timings, costs or opening hours, because those change and a printed guide cannot keep them true.

What the Church Asks of a Pilgrim

The Church asks the same things in India that it asks anywhere. Go with an intention. Prepare by confession where you can, and receive the Eucharist at the shrine. Give alms, which at an Indian shrine means giving thoughtfully rather than reflexively. Respect the customs of the place, including the barefoot walking and the head covering practices some shrines keep. Treat the local community as hosts rather than as scenery, and buy from them. Our guides to confession and to the Eucharist cover the sacramental side, and our guide to the meaning of pilgrimage covers the rest.

One warning that applies here more than in Europe. Indian shrines attract vendors selling blessed objects with extravagant claims attached to them. Sacramentals are real and the Church encourages them, and no medal, oil or water works automatically or binds God to anything. If a seller promises a guaranteed result, they are selling superstition and the shrine would tell you the same.