Late Colonial Period
Such was the state of affairs when in 1886 a fresh concordat was entered into between the Holy See and Portugal, which showed itself disposed to accommodate itself to the changed conditions of the times. The concordat was preceded by negotiations with England, to make sure that the British Government would not object to the continuance of the Portuguese royal patronage in its Eastern possessions. Accordingly, the Primacy of the East of the archbishops of Goa was reaffirmed, while in addition they were accorded the honorary title of Patriarch of the East Indies and the substantial privilege of presiding at the plenary councils of the East Indies, which were ordinarily to assemble at Goa, while the special relations existing between the Archdiocese of Goa and its suffragan dioceses were to be continued. But the limits of the original Portuguese dioceses were contracted, the Diocese of Saint Thomas of Mylapur being assigned two distinct pieces of territory on the Coromandel Coast, some 150 miles (240 km) apart- the first is a triangle of an area of some 800 square miles (2,100 km2), in the northern angle of which Saint Thomas lies; the other is roughly the ancient Kingdom of Tanjore. In addition, both by the concordat and certain appendixes thereto, the diocese was given five churches in the Archdiocese of Madras—the old vicariates Apostolic having been converted into dioceses as a sequel to the concordat by the Constitution "Humanae salutis" of 1886, of Leo XIII—three churches in the Archdiocese of Calcutta (Western Bengal), five churches in the Diocese of Dacca (Eastern Bengal), and twenty-four churches in the Diocese of Trichinopoly (which originally belonged to the Diocese of Cochin), with their congregations.
The first bishop appointed to Saint Thomas of Mylapur on the conclusion of the new concordat was the princely Dom Henrique José Reed da Silva, who was at the time coadjutor to the Archbishop of Goa, and who took possession of his see in 1886. He was the first to sign himself for the sake of brevity, Bishop of Mylapur, a practice which his successors have adopted. Hence the diocese became better known in India as the Diocese of Mylapur. His was the arduous task of putting the broken shreds of the old historic diocese together and rendering it once again the thing of beauty it was. His first care was to reform the diocesan seminary, and in order to have an efficient body of European priests with their heart in their work, he brought out a number of young boys from Portugal and gave them a collegiate course in English, in the college to which he had raised the existing high-school, previous to their entering upon their ecclesiastical course of studies. His successors reaped the benefit of his policy. He opened a convent of European nuns at Saint Thomas, and another of Indian nuns in Mylapur, which have since thrown out branches into various parts of the diocese. He invited English-speaking priests to join his diocese (a call to which the present writer responded) and established the "Catholic Register", a weekly newspaper. His courtly manners and noble bearing made him a favourite in society. Soon the people felt it an honour to point to him as their bishop. He pulled down the old cathedral, the chapel over the grave of St. Thomas and the old Augustinian priory, that had nothing antique to commend them, and built a magnificent cathedral in the centre of which, between the nave and chancel, lies the grave of St. Thomas. Despite the good he was accomplishing, he incurred the ill-will of certain parties connected with the churches situated in other dioceses, and when he found the accusations brought against him accepted without demur in Europe, he resigned and retired to Portugal, as titular Bishop of Trajanopolis.
He was succeeded by Dom António José de Sousa Barroso, who within a few months of his arrival at Saint Thomas was promoted to the See of Oporto. Bishop Barroso was succeeded by bishop Dom Teotónio Manuel Ribeiro Vieira de Castro, who was presented on 12 June 1899, and confirmed by Leo XIII ten days later. He was consecrated at Oporto on 15 August 1899, and reached Saint Thomas on 23 December. The tercentenary of the creation of the diocese occurred in January 1906, in which almost all of the archbishops and bishops of the vast tract that constituted the original Diocese of Saint Thomas of Mylapur took part in person in addition to the delegate Apostolic and other prelates, numbering fifteen bishops in all. With the single exception of the Archdiocese of Madras, all of the dioceses into which the original Diocese of Saint Thomas of Mylapur is divided were served by non-British clergy, save for the Indian and few Indo-European priests, where there are any. But even in the Archdiocese of Madras, served by the British Missionary Society of St. Joseph, the majority of the priests and the coadjutor bishop were from the Continent. Dacca was served by the Fathers of the Holy Cross from Notre Dame, Indiana, United States of America.
Read more about this topic: Dioceses Of Saint Thomas Of Mylapore
Famous quotes containing the words late, colonial and/or period:
“If mothers are told to do this or that or the other,... they lose touch with their own ability to act.... Only too easily they feel incompetent. If they must look up everything in a book, they are always too late even when they do the right things, because the right things have to be done immediately. It is only possible to act at exactly the right point when the action is intuitive or by instinct, as we say. The mind can be brought to bear on the problem afterwards.”
—D.W. Winnicott (20th century)
“Are you there, Africa with the bulging chest and oblong thigh? Sulking Africa, wrought of iron, in the fire, Africa of the millions of royal slaves, deported Africa, drifting continent, are you there? Slowly you vanish, you withdraw into the past, into the tales of castaways, colonial museums, the works of scholars.”
—Jean Genet (1910–1986)
“His singing carried me back to the period of the discovery of America ... when Europeans first encountered the simple faith of the Indian. There was, indeed, a beautiful simplicity about it; nothing of the dark and savage, only the mild and infantile. The sentiments of humility and reverence chiefly were expressed.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)