Velankanni Basilica: Our Lady of Health

1. What Velankanni Is

Velankanni is a small coastal town in the Nagapattinam district of Tamil Nadu, on the Bay of Bengal, and the home of the Shrine Basilica of Our Lady of Good Health. Tamil speakers call the Blessed Virgin Mary under this title Arokia Matha, the Mother of Good Health, and pilgrims come to ask her prayers for the sick, for children, for work and for safe travel, and to fulfil vows made when an earlier request was granted. The church belongs to the Diocese of Thanjavur, and Pope John XXIII raised it to the rank of a minor basilica in 1962.

The name is written both Velankanni and Vailankanni, and both spellings refer to the same place. The town sits on the coast a short distance south of Nagapattinam, an old port on the Coromandel Coast that traded with Southeast Asia long before European ships arrived. The sea matters to the story of the shrine. One of the founding accounts concerns sailors caught in a storm, the beach lies a short walk from the basilica, and the fishing villages along this coast have been Catholic for generations.

Two things distinguish Velankanni from the Marian shrines that Western readers know best. The first is that its origin lies in tradition preserved by a village rather than in a documented investigation of a named visionary. There is no Bernadette here whose interviews were written down within weeks, and no diocesan commission whose findings survive. The second is the character of the crowd. Velankanni draws Catholics from every part of India and from the Indian diaspora, and it also draws large numbers of Hindus and Muslims, who make vows there and keep them.

Velankanni is treated alongside Old Goa, San Thome in Chennai and the Kerala shrines in our survey of Christian pilgrimage sites across India, which covers the country's route as a whole. This page stays with Velankanni itself: what stands there, what is claimed for it, what happens during the novena and the feast, and how a pilgrim should approach it.

2. The Three Traditions Behind the Shrine

Three accounts stand behind the shrine at Velankanni, and local tradition has carried all three for centuries. They are usually placed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and the surviving tellings come from a long oral inheritance later written down, which is why the dates given for them vary from one printed version to another. They are set out here as the shrine itself sets them out, as tradition rather than as decreed fact.

The Shepherd Boy and the Milk

In the first account, a Hindu shepherd boy was carrying milk to a customer and stopped to rest beside a pond. A lady of great beauty appeared to him holding a child, and asked for milk for her son. The boy gave what he had. When he reached the house where the milk was expected and apologised for the shortfall, the pot was found to be full. He led the household back to the pond, where the lady appeared again. The pond is called Matha Kulam, Our Lady's Tank, and a chapel stands there today.

The Lame Boy and the Buttermilk

In the second account, a poor boy who was lame sold buttermilk near a banyan tree at a spot now called Nadu Thittu, the middle mound. The same lady with her child appeared to him, asked for buttermilk for the boy in her arms, and then told him to go to a Catholic gentleman in Nagapattinam and ask that a chapel be built at that place. The boy said he could not walk. He was told to go, and he walked. The gentleman, according to the tradition, had himself dreamed of the child asking for a chapel, and the chapel was built.

The Portuguese Sailors and the Storm

In the third account, a Portuguese merchant ship bound for Sri Lanka was caught in a violent storm in the Bay of Bengal. The sailors prayed to Our Lady, whom they invoked as their star of the sea, and vowed to build a chapel to her wherever they came ashore alive. They landed safely at Velankanni on 8 September, the feast of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary. They found the small chapel already standing, enlarged it, gave it a permanent roof, and dedicated it to Our Lady of Good Health. Later voyages brought further work, and the sailors are credited with the statue and the altar.

Read together, the three accounts explain three features of the shrine that a visitor sees immediately: the tank, the chapel at Nadu Thittu, and the fixed date of the feast. They also explain the shape of the devotion. In the first two accounts a poor boy is asked for something he can barely spare and is given back more than he gave, and in the third a group of frightened men make a vow and keep it. Both patterns are still visible in the crowd every September.

3. What the Church Has and Has Not Declared

No apparition decree has ever been issued for Velankanni. No bishop and no Roman dicastery has declared that the shepherd boy, the buttermilk seller or the rescue of the Portuguese sailors were supernatural events, and anyone who writes that the Velankanni apparitions are Vatican approved has stated something the record does not contain. What the Church has done is approve and encourage the devotion, which is a different act.

That distinction is not a technicality invented for this shrine. Several of the most venerated Marian sites in the world stand on the same ground. Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico rests on immemorial cult and on papal liturgical decisions rather than on an apparition decree, as our guide to the Basilica of Guadalupe sets out. Velankanni belongs to that pattern: a devotion the Church received, examined pastorally over a long period, and blessed by acts of a different kind.

The Acts That Do Exist

The documented acts behind Velankanni are these. The shrine is a parish and a diocesan shrine of the Diocese of Thanjavur, which was erected in 1952. Pope John XXIII raised the church to the rank of a minor basilica in 1962, a title granted to churches of particular importance for the liturgical and pastoral life of a region. The feast is celebrated publicly with the support of the bishops of Tamil Nadu, and the shrine is served by clergy of the diocese. Those acts say that the devotion is sound and that the place is worth the journey. They say nothing about whether a lady appeared beside a pond.

The 2024 Norms and Why They Matter Here

On 17 May 2024 the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith published the Norms for Proceeding in the Discernment of Alleged Supernatural Phenomena, replacing the norms in force since 1978. Under them the Church ordinarily makes no declaration that a phenomenon is supernatural at all. Six conclusions are possible: nihil obstat, prae oculis habeatur, curatur, sub mandato, prohibetur et obstruitur, and declaratio de non supernaturalitate. The usual favourable outcome is a nihil obstat, which permits and encourages public devotion while leaving the question of origin open.

Velankanni was never processed under those norms, because there was never a live case to process. The devotion was already centuries old and already approved in practice when the norms were written. The norms are still useful for reading the shrine correctly, because they name exactly the position Velankanni occupies: devotion permitted and encouraged, supernatural origin not declared. Our guide to how the Church judges Marian apparition sites works through the six conclusions in full and applies them case by case.

Source: Norms for Proceeding in the Discernment of Alleged Supernatural Phenomena, Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, published 17 May 2024 and available on vatican.va. The six conclusions listed above are the document's own headings. The status of Velankanni as a minor basilica dates from 1962 under Pope John XXIII. No apparition decree for Velankanni has been published by any authority, and none is cited here.

4. From Thatched Chapel to Minor Basilica

The building history of Velankanni runs from a thatched shelter to a basilica with an upper church, and each stage was driven by the size of the crowd. The tradition describes a first small chapel raised after the lame boy carried his message, then a more solid structure given by the Portuguese sailors who came ashore on 8 September, and then successive enlargements as the devotion spread inland from the coast.

The Colonial Centuries

The Coromandel Coast passed through Portuguese, Dutch, French and British hands, and Nagapattinam changed rulers more than once. The shrine survived those changes, which tells its own story: the devotion was carried by Tamil villagers and fishermen rather than by any European garrison, and it outlasted every European administration on that coast. Missionary clergy served it at various periods, and the care of the shrine passed in time to the Indian clergy of the region.

1962 and the Basilica Title

In 1962 Pope John XXIII raised the shrine church to the rank of a minor basilica. The title is granted to a church of unusual significance, and it carries a real change in standing: the basilica is linked in a particular way to the Bishop of Rome, and the rank is a public statement that the Church values what happens there. For a shrine in a fishing town in Tamil Nadu, granted in the same period as the opening of the Second Vatican Council, the act also said something about the Church in India taking its place in the universal Church on its own terms.

The Church That Stands Today

The basilica is a white Gothic-styled church with red-tiled roofs and twin towers, extended over the years to hold the pilgrims who arrive for the feast. An upper church was added above the original nave, so that Masses can run in parallel, and the surrounding grounds carry the further chapels, halls and open spaces described in the next section. The architecture is European in inspiration and the setting is entirely Tamil: coconut palms, sand, sea wind, and a street of stalls leading to the doors.

The scale of the complex is the clearest evidence of how the devotion grew. Every building at Velankanni answered a crowd that had already arrived.

5. The Basilica and the Shrine Complex

The shrine at Velankanni is a complex rather than a single church, and a pilgrim moves between several places over the course of a visit. The main points are set out below. Approaches, service times and facilities change from year to year, so nothing here depends on them.

The Statue and the Sari

The venerated image shows Mary standing with the Child Jesus on her arm. She is dressed in a sari, and the vesting of the image is itself part of the devotion, with saris presented by pilgrims in thanksgiving. A Tamil Catholic looking at that image sees the Mother of God dressed as the women of the household are dressed, which is precisely the point of the inculturation. The Word became flesh in a particular place and a particular culture, and the Church has always let the image of his mother be received in the culture that receives him.

The Offering Museum

The hall of offerings is the part of the shrine that surprises visitors most. Pilgrims who believe a petition was granted return with a gift, and the gifts are kept: small silver or gold plaques shaped as a limb, an eye, a heart, a child or a house, models of ships and vehicles, crutches, and written accounts. Offerings of this kind, called ex-votos, are found at Christian shrines from the catacombs onward, and the hall at Velankanni holds a very large working collection of them. The hall is a record of what people believed happened to them and of what they did about it. It is not a register of verified cures, and the shrine has never presented it as one.

Note on numbers: figures for annual pilgrim attendance at Velankanni circulate widely in Indian media and in tour material, and they derive from local estimates rather than from any audited count. None is given on this page. The description of the crowd here is qualitative for that reason.

6. The Feast of 8 September

The feast of Our Lady of Good Health at Velankanni falls on 8 September, which is the feast of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary in the universal calendar of the Church. The date comes from the third tradition, in which the Portuguese sailors are said to have come ashore on that day and to have dedicated their chapel accordingly. The birthday of Mary and the founding of the shrine are therefore kept together.

Why the Nativity of Mary

The Nativity of Mary is one of only three birthdays the Church celebrates in her calendar, alongside the birth of Christ at Christmas and the birth of John the Baptist on 24 June. The reason is scriptural in shape: the birth of the mother is celebrated because of the Son she would bear. Scripture records the annunciation of that motherhood plainly, and the shrine's devotion runs directly from it.

The crowd at Velankanni on 8 September is one literal fulfilment of that verse among many. Tamil, Malayalam, Telugu, Kannada, Konkani, Hindi and English are all spoken in it, and Masses are offered in several languages through the day.

What Happens on the Day

The pattern of the feast day is Mass, procession and blessing. Masses run through the day in the basilica and in the other churches of the complex. The venerated statue is carried in procession in a decorated car, and pilgrims walk with it, many barefoot, singing Tamil Marian hymns. Candles are lit and carried. Petitions written on paper are handed in. The feast closes with the lowering of the flag that was raised eleven days earlier, which formally ends the celebration.

Anyone who has been in a large Indian festival crowd knows the texture: heat, dust, colour, loudspeakers, and a great deal of patience. Pilgrims who want time to pray at length in front of the image usually come outside the novena and the feast, when the basilica is quiet and the tank is nearly empty.

7. The Flag Hoisting and the Novena

The Velankanni feast is preceded by a novena of eleven days that opens on 29 August with the hoisting of a flag, called kodiyetram in Tamil. A flag bearing the image of Our Lady of Good Health is raised on the shrine mast, and from that moment the feast is understood to have begun. The flag stays up through the novena and the feast day, and it is lowered when the celebration ends.

Why Eleven Days for a Nine-Day Novena

A novena is by definition nine days of prayer, from the Latin for nine, and it takes its pattern from the nine days the apostles and Mary spent in prayer between the Ascension and Pentecost (Acts 1:14). At Velankanni the observance is extended to eleven days so that the nine days of prayer are framed by the opening flag hoisting and by the vigil of the feast. The devotion itself is the ordinary Catholic novena: a fixed period of daily prayer for a stated intention, made with the Church rather than in isolation.

What the Flag Means

The raising of a flag to open a festival is a shared idiom in Tamil Nadu, kept at temples as well as at churches, and its use at Velankanni is an example of the Church speaking in the vocabulary of the place. The Catholic content is fixed by what is written on the flag and by what happens under it: the image is of Our Lady of Good Health, the days that follow are given to Mass, confession, the Rosary and the novena prayers, and the whole sequence is ordered to the feast of Mary's nativity. The form is local. The worship is Catholic and is offered to God alone.

Praying the Novena Away From Velankanni

Most people who keep the Velankanni novena never travel to Velankanni. Parishes across India and across the Indian diaspora, in Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Singapore, the Gulf, Britain, Canada, Australia and the United States, keep the novena in their own churches during the same eleven days and hold their own feast on 8 September. Anyone can pray it privately: nine days of a stated intention, a decade or a full Rosary each day, and Mass on the feast. Our collection of Asian Christian prayers gathers prayer texts from these traditions, and this page stays with the shrine itself.

8. How Pilgrims Come: Vows, Tonsure, Offerings

Pilgrims arrive at Velankanni with a vow, and the practices that a visitor notices are mostly the keeping of vows. The pattern is old and it is simple: a person in trouble asks Our Lady's prayers and promises something in return, the trouble passes, and the person travels to the shrine to do what was promised. The variety of the promises is what fills the shrine grounds.

Walking, Often Barefoot

Many pilgrims walk the last stretch to the basilica barefoot, and some walk for days from their own districts, carrying nothing much. Groups walk together from parishes across Tamil Nadu during the novena. The walking is penitential and it is also practical: a walked pilgrimage costs a poor family less than a bus, and it turns the journey itself into the prayer. The same instinct produced the pilgrim roads of Europe, as our guide to the Camino de Santiago routes describes.

Orange Dress

Pilgrims frequently wear orange or saffron clothing for the journey. The colour is not a Catholic liturgical colour and its use here is borrowed from the wider religious culture of southern India, where it marks a person as being under a vow and travelling to a shrine. Catholics who wear it are signalling the state of pilgrimage, and the practice is one of the clearest examples at Velankanni of a local sign carrying a Christian meaning.

Tonsure

Some pilgrims have their heads shaved at the shrine in fulfilment of a vow. The practice is widespread at Hindu shrines in southern India, and it is also biblical: the Nazirite vow in Numbers 6 ends with the shaving of the head, and Acts 18:18 records that Paul cut his hair at Cenchreae because of a vow he had taken. The Church at Velankanni permits it as a personal act of thanksgiving. What is offered is the hair, and what is meant is the self.

Candles, Saris and Ex-Votos

Candles are lit in very large numbers, some of them tall and heavy and carried a long way. Saris are presented for the vesting of the image. Silver and gold plaques shaped as the healed limb, or as an eye, a heart, a house, a ship or a child, are given and are kept in the offering hall. Written accounts of answered prayer are handed in. Alms are given to the poor at the shrine, and this last practice is the one the Church presses hardest, because charity is the offering Scripture asks for first.

9. Why Hindus and Muslims Come

Hindu and Muslim pilgrims come to Velankanni in large numbers, and they come as pilgrims rather than as sightseers. They make vows, walk barefoot, light candles, present offerings in the hall, join the procession and ask Arokia Matha to pray for a sick child or a failing business. The shrine has never made a religious test a condition of entry, and the Catholic custodians of Velankanni have not tried to reshape the crowd that arrives.

How Hindu Pilgrims Describe It

Hindu pilgrims at Velankanni generally describe Arokia Matha as a powerful and compassionate mother who answers those who come to her, and they place her in the wide category of divine motherhood that Hindu devotion already recognises in many forms. Vows, tonsure, walking pilgrimage, offerings of hair and metal, and the fulfilment of a promise after a favour are all long-established in the religious life of Tamil Nadu, so the acts required at Velankanni are already familiar. That is stated here as Hindu pilgrims themselves state it, and the description belongs to them.

How Muslim Pilgrims Describe It

Muslim pilgrims come in smaller but steady numbers. Mary, called Maryam, is honoured in the Qur'an, which devotes a sura to her and records the annunciation and the virgin birth of Isa, and Muslim visitors who come to Velankanni frequently point to that when asked. They come to ask for healing and for children, and they take care to distinguish asking for prayer from worship, which in Islamic terms belongs to God alone. Our guide to Islam and Christianity compares the two traditions in detail.

The Catholic Response

The Catholic position on this is settled and it has two parts. The first part is welcome. The Second Vatican Council taught in Nostra Aetate that the Church rejects nothing that is true and holy in other religions, and a Hindu mother who asks the mother of Christ to pray for her sick son is doing something the Church can only receive with respect. The second part is clarity. Catholic worship is offered to God alone, Mary is honoured and asked for her prayers rather than worshipped, and Holy Communion is reserved to Catholics who are properly disposed. That reservation is a rule about the sacrament rather than a judgment on any visitor.

The pastoral practice at Velankanni holds those two parts together. Nobody is turned away from the grounds, the basilica, the tank or the procession. Nobody is told that Christian and non-Christian belief are the same thing. Both halves of that are honest, and the shrine works because it keeps them both.

10. What "Our Lady of Health" Means

The title Our Lady of Good Health names Mary as the one whose prayers are sought for the sick. It makes no claim that Mary is the source of a cure, that she heals by her own power, or that the shrine possesses a power of its own. Catholic teaching on this is exact: God heals, and Mary intercedes, which means she prays to her Son for those who ask her, as she did at the wedding at Cana when she brought a need to him and then said, "Do whatever he tells you" (John 2:5).

The Catechism states that Mary's intercession takes nothing from and adds nothing to the dignity of Christ the one Mediator, and that her maternal role flows entirely from his mediation and depends entirely on it (CCC 970). Every Marian title in the Church, including this one, is to be read inside that sentence. Asking Mary to pray for a sick child is the same act as asking a friend to pray for a sick child, addressed to someone who is alive in Christ and close to him.

What the Church Claims About Cures Here

The Church has published no register of medically authenticated cures at Velankanni comparable to the medical bureau at Lourdes, which has examined claims under a formal procedure since the nineteenth century. Our guide to the Lourdes pilgrimage describes how that process works and how few cases pass it. Velankanni has no equivalent body, so the accounts of healing that fill the offering hall are personal testimony rather than verified findings. They should be described as testimony, and they should not be inflated into evidence.

That restraint is not scepticism about God's power. Scripture records healing plainly, the Church has always prayed for the sick and anointed them, and the sacrament of the anointing of the sick exists for exactly this. Our guide to miracles and how the Church investigates them works through the standard the Church applies before calling anything a miracle, and the standard is deliberately severe.

When the Healing Does Not Come

Most pilgrims who ask at Velankanni for a cure do not receive one, and any honest account of the shrine has to say so. The Church's answer to that is the cross. Christ himself asked that a cup pass from him and then prayed, "yet not my will, but yours be done" (Luke 22:42), and the pattern of Christian prayer in suffering runs through that verse. Paul asked three times for a thorn in the flesh to be removed and was answered with grace rather than removal (2 Corinthians 12:7-9). A pilgrim who comes home still sick has not been refused by God, and our guide to why God allows suffering takes that question up at length.

11. The Shrine and the 2004 Tsunami

On 26 December 2004 the tsunami generated by the earthquake off Sumatra struck the Coromandel Coast, and Velankanni was among the places hit. The Nagapattinam district suffered heavy loss of life, and pilgrims and residents at Velankanni were killed, many of them on the beach near the shrine on a day when large numbers had come for the Christmas season. The disaster is part of the recent memory of the place and it is remembered there.

The basilica itself survived, and the shrine became a centre for relief in the weeks that followed, as churches, temples and mosques along that coast did. Coastal Tamil Nadu is a fishing economy, and the villages around the shrine lost boats, houses and families together.

What the Shrine Does Not Say About It

Some accounts that circulated afterwards presented the survival of the basilica as a miracle and the deaths on the beach as a judgment. The shrine has not taught either, and neither should be repeated. A wave that killed the devout and the indifferent alike carries no legible verdict on anyone, and Christ warned specifically against reading disaster that way when he was asked about the eighteen killed by the falling tower of Siloam.

What the shrine does say is what a shrine is for. The dead are prayed for, the bereaved are received, and the sea is still there beyond the palms when a pilgrim walks down to it. Pilgrims who come to Velankanni today often walk to the beach to pray for those who were lost and for those who work the water, and that is the right use of the memory.

12. Questions Other Christians Raise

A shrine like Velankanni draws serious objections from other Christians, and they deserve to be stated properly before any answer is given. The objections come mostly from Protestant Christians in India, of whom there are many, and they are made in good faith by people who read the same Scripture.

The Evangelical and Pentecostal Objection

Evangelical and Pentecostal Christians in India commonly hold that Scripture is the sole final authority in matters of faith, that there is one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus (1 Timothy 2:5), and that prayer should therefore be addressed to God through Christ and to no one else. On this view, asking Mary to intercede diverts to a creature the confidence that belongs to Christ alone, and the physical practices at a shrine, the offerings, the vesting of an image, the tonsure and the vows, look like the very syncretism that the New Testament warns against. Pentecostal Christians in Tamil Nadu, who pray fervently and expectantly for healing themselves, would say that healing comes by faith in Christ and requires no shrine, no image and no journey. That is a coherent position and it is honestly held.

The Catholic Response

The Catholic answer distinguishes worship from intercession. Worship, latria, is offered to God alone, and Catholic teaching is explicit that it is offered to no creature whatever, Mary included. Honour and the request for prayer are a different act, and Christians have asked one another for prayer since the beginning (James 5:16, Romans 15:30). The Catholic claim is that death does not break communion with Christ, so those who are alive in him can be asked for prayer as living friends can. Regarding 1 Timothy 2:5, the Catechism holds that Christ's unique mediation is not diminished by the intercession of others, because whatever they do they do in him and by his gift (CCC 970). Our guide to the Catholic and Protestant differences sets out the whole debate.

The Objection About Inculturation

A second objection concerns the local practices specifically. Critics ask whether saffron dress, tonsure, flag hoisting and the vesting of an image with saris amount to importing Hindu worship into a Christian shrine. The Catholic response is that the Church has always received the forms of a culture and given them Christian content, and that the test is what is believed and to whom worship is offered. Numbers 6 and Acts 18:18 show head shaving inside biblical religion. Clothing an image and processing with it are old Christian practices in Europe as well as Asia. The question a pastor asks at Velankanni is whether a given pilgrim understands that God alone is worshipped, and where the answer is no, the answer is catechesis rather than the abolition of the sign.

The Orthodox View

Eastern Orthodox Christians hold the intercession of the Theotokos with at least as much conviction as Catholics do, and would have no objection in principle to asking Mary's prayers at a shrine. Orthodox devotion is centred on the icon rather than the statue, and its Marian feasts and hymns run through the whole liturgical year. The differences between the Catholic and Orthodox Churches lie elsewhere, principally in the papacy and the filioque, as our guide to the Eastern Orthodox Church explains. The Oriental Orthodox Churches, which include the Malankara tradition in India and are a distinct communion from the Eastern Orthodox, likewise honour Mary highly and keep her feasts with great solemnity.

13. Making the Pilgrimage Well

A pilgrimage to Velankanni is worth preparing for, and the preparation that matters is spiritual rather than logistical. Practical arrangements change from year to year and are best checked directly with the shrine and with your own parish. What follows does not change.

Go With a Named Intention

Decide before you leave what you are asking for and write it down. Vague pilgrimage produces vague prayer. Most pilgrims at Velankanni carry a specific and heavy request, and the honesty of that is part of why the place has the character it has. Bring the intention of someone else as well as your own.

Go to Confession

Confession is available at the shrine and is one of the main things that happens there during the novena. Going to confession as part of a pilgrimage is the oldest pattern there is: a journey made in the body to mark a turning made in the soul. Our guide to the sacrament of confession covers what to do if it has been many years.

Pray the Rosary on the Way

The Rosary is the natural prayer of a Marian pilgrimage and it is what most Velankanni pilgrims pray on the road. The Joyful Mysteries, which begin with the annunciation and the visitation, sit particularly close to a shrine kept on the feast of Mary's nativity. Our guide to how to pray the Rosary gives the full sequence.

Give Alms

Give to the poor at the shrine and give properly. Scripture puts almsgiving alongside prayer and fasting in the same paragraph of the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 6:1-18), and a pilgrimage that spends on candles and nothing on the poor at the gate has missed the pattern.

Come Home and Keep the Vow

If you promise something, do it. The offering hall at Velankanni is a hall of kept promises, and the seriousness of the place rests on the fact that ordinary people travel long distances to keep them. A vow lightly made and quietly dropped is worse than no vow at all, which is why Scripture counsels care before making one (Ecclesiastes 5:4-5).

If You Cannot Travel

Most people who love Velankanni will never reach it. The novena can be prayed anywhere over the same eleven days, the feast can be kept at Mass on 8 September in any parish in the world, and the Rosary needs no shrine. Our guide to making a pilgrimage without leaving home sets out how to structure that so it stays a real spiritual exercise. What the sick and the housebound cannot do in the body, they can do in the will, and the Church has always held that the second is what counts.