The men and women of this land whom the Church has declared saints. Five of them are from Kerala, and their shrines at Bharananganam, Mannanam, Ollur, Kuzhikkattussery and Kottar are places our families have prayed at for generations.
Four Syro-Malabar religious and one Latin-rite layman, canonised between 2008 and 2022.
A Franciscan Clarist sister from Kottayam whose short life was marked by illness borne quietly, and whose tomb at Bharananganam draws pilgrims from across India.
Read the historyPriest, founder of the first indigenous religious congregations in Kerala, and the man behind the rule that every parish should run a school.
Read the historyA Carmelite sister of Thrissur who spent fifty years in the same convent and became known across the district as a woman to whom people brought their troubles.
Read the historyShe built her work around the family home: visiting the sick, sitting with the dying, and founding a congregation whose purpose was the welfare of families.
Read the historyA palace official of Travancore who was baptised, refused to recant, and was shot after three years of imprisonment. He is the first Indian layman declared a saint.
Read the historyThe apostle whose mission began it, the first saint born on Indian soil, and those whose work here is remembered far beyond it.
One of the twelve, and by the constant tradition of the Saint Thomas Christians the apostle who brought the faith to the Malabar coast in AD 52.
Read the historyBorn in Goa, he entered Dutch-ruled Ceylon in disguise when Catholic priests were banned, and spent twenty-four years rebuilding the Church there.
Read the historyBorn near Mumbai to a Portuguese father and an Indian mother, he was crucified at Nagasaki with twenty-five companions and is the first person born in India to be canonised.
Read the historyA founding Jesuit whose missions ran from Goa to the Fishery Coast, Malacca and Japan, and whose remains are enshrined in Old Goa.
Read the historyShe came to India at eighteen to teach, left the classroom for the streets of Calcutta, and built an order that now works in more than a hundred countries.
Read the historyDates of birth, death, beatification and canonisation are given as recorded by the Holy See. Where a detail rests on tradition rather than documentation, as with the mission of St Thomas, the page says so.