Vailankanni (Velankanni), Tamil Nadu, India · 16th century
On the long, low coast of Tamil Nadu, where the Bay of Bengal washes the southern shore of India, there stands a great basilica known as “the Lourdes of the East.” For more than four hundred years, Our Lady of Good Health has been honored at Vailankanni — a place where Hindus, Christians, and Muslims alike come to bring their sick, their grieving, and their longing to the feet of the Mother who heals.
Three Apparitions on the Indian Coast
The story is told in three encounters. In the late sixteenth century, a Hindu shepherd boy carrying milk from a nearby village fell asleep beneath a banyan tree. He awoke to see a beautiful woman holding a child, who asked for milk for her son. He gave what he had. When he reached his master’s house with the half-empty pot, his master was angry — until they together returned and found the pot full to overflowing.
Some time later, a lame buttermilk-seller, a young boy, also rested under the same tree. Our Lady appeared again with the Child Jesus and asked for buttermilk. After he had given some, she asked him to go to a Catholic gentleman in the nearby town of Nagapattinam and ask for a chapel to be built there. As he stood up — for the first time in his life — he ran. The chapel was built.
In the seventeenth century, a Portuguese merchant ship caught in a great storm in the Bay of Bengal vowed that if Our Lady saved them, they would build a church wherever they came ashore. They survived. They came ashore at Vailankanni, where the chapel already stood, and there they built the church that has grown into the great Basilica of Our Lady of Good Health. The shrine has been a place of recorded healings ever since.
The Sanctuary Today
Today the basilica draws more than twenty million pilgrims a year. The annual feast in the first week of September gathers crowds in the millions — many of them Hindu, who honor “Velankanni Matha” with the same devotion as their Catholic neighbors. The shrine has long been one of the great signs of interfaith harmony in India.
The image of Our Lady of Good Health is in the saffron-and-gold robes that have come to symbolize the shrine. The Christ Child in her arms blesses every pilgrim who comes. Around the basilica walls hang the votive offerings of those who have been healed: small gold figures, photographs, letters in many Indian languages — the visible remembering of an unseen Mother.
A Prayer at Vailankanni
Mother of Good Health,
you who came to a poor shepherd boy
and to a lame child on an Indian road —
remember every body that hurts.
Remember the mothers who sit by sick children,
the fishermen on dangerous seas,
the widow with no help.
Let what you did for the buttermilk-seller
be done quietly today
for those whose names are known to you alone. Amen.
Live from Vailankanni
The Basilica of Our Lady of Good Health broadcasts the Holy Mass and the Rosary regularly, and each year during the September feast a great Indian pilgrimage gathers around the shrine.
Visit & Learn More
- Vailankanni Shrine (official): vailankannishrine.net
- Wikipedia: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basilica_of_Our_Lady_of_Good_Health
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