Matthew Kadalikattil

Mathew Kadalikkattil (also spelled Matthew Kadalikattil) was a priest of the Syro-Malabar Catholic Church in central Kerala, in southwestern India. He was born on 25 April 1872 at Palai (Pala), in the present-day Kottayam district of Kerala, then within the princely state of Travancore under British paramountcy. He belonged to the Saint Thomas Christian community, which traces its origins to the ancient East Syriac tradition of the Malabar Coast and which, in his lifetime, was organized as an Eastern Catholic church in full communion with Rome. After ecclesiastical studies in the seminaries that served the Syro-Malabar vicariates, he was ordained to the priesthood on 11 February 1901. He remained a diocesan (secular) priest rather than entering a religious order, and he exercised his ministry in the Palai region, which at that period formed part of the Vicariate Apostolic of Changanacherry rather than a separate eparchy of its own.

The work for which he is chiefly remembered is the foundation of a women’s religious institute dedicated to the Sacred Heart of Jesus. Shaped by a personal devotion to the Sacred Heart that was characteristic of Catholic piety in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, he established the Congregation of the Sacred Heart at Palai on 1 January 1911. The congregation was intended to promote the Christian education of girls, to assist the poor, the sick, and orphans, and to undertake other charitable and pastoral works among Syro-Malabar Catholics. In the social setting of early twentieth-century Travancore, where formal schooling for women was still limited, such a foundation had both religious and social importance. As a diocesan priest-founder rather than a member of the institute, Kadalikkattil guided the first sisters, sought ecclesiastical approval, and formed the community in a life of prayer and service amid the ordinary difficulties that attend new foundations.

He is not recorded as having held episcopal office or any patriarchal or papal dignity. Contemporary notices and later accounts from the Syro-Malabar Church describe him as a priest of regular sacramental and parish ministry, known for attention to the poor and for a reputation of personal austerity and prayer. He spent his remaining years in pastoral and formative duties connected with Palai and with the congregation he had founded. He died at Palai on 23 May 1935. His remains were interred at the motherhouse of the Sacred Heart Congregation in Palai, which became a place of local devotion.

After his death a reputation for holiness persisted especially among the Sacred Heart sisters and the faithful of Palai. A cause for canonization was introduced in the Catholic Church; he was named a Servant of God, and on 27 April 2013 Pope Francis authorized the decree on his heroic virtues, by which he received the title Venerable. He has not been beatified or canonized, and no official universal feast day or list of patronages has been assigned to him. He remains a figure of regional importance in Kerala Catholicism as an example of diocesan priesthood and as founder of the Sacred Heart Congregation of Palai.