Thomas Kurialacherry

Thomas Kurialacherry was born on 14 January 1873 at Champakulam in the princely state of Travancore, in the region that is now the Indian state of Kerala, into a Syro-Malabar Catholic family. He received his early education locally and was sent to Rome for ecclesiastical studies at the Pontifical Urban College of Propaganda Fide. He was ordained a priest in Rome in 1899 and then returned to Kerala for pastoral work. At that period the Syro-Malabar Church was still organized under vicariates apostolic rather than a fully established hierarchy of its own, and Latin-rite authorities continued to exercise considerable influence over Eastern Catholic life in India.

As a priest he became known for a marked personal devotion to the Eucharist and for an interest in the education of girls and the spiritual formation of women. In 1908 he founded the Congregation of the Sisters of the Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament (SABS) at Champakulam. The community was dedicated to adoration of the Blessed Sacrament together with educational and charitable work, and it later became one of the principal women’s religious institutes of the Syro-Malabar Church. His priestly ministry thus combined parish work with the organization of a new congregation at a time when indigenous religious life for women in the Syro-Malabar community was still taking institutional shape.

In 1911 he was appointed Vicar Apostolic of Changanacherry after Mar Mathew Makil was transferred to the newly erected Vicariate of Kottayam, which had been created for the Knanaya (Southist) community. Kurialacherry was consecrated bishop the same year, at Kandy in Ceylon, and thereby became the first bishop of Changanacherry in its modern vicariate form, serving the larger Northist Syro-Malabar population of the area. During his episcopate he promoted Catholic education, parish life, and the distinctive identity and discipline of the Syro-Malabar rite. He encouraged schools and the work of religious congregations in a period of social and ecclesial change in Travancore, including debates over caste, education, and the relation of the Eastern Catholic community to Latin-rite jurisdiction.

Kurialacherry travelled to Rome in 1925 and died there on 2 June 1925. His mortal remains were later brought back to Kerala and interred in the cathedral at Changanassery. He is remembered in the Syro-Malabar Church as a pioneer of Eucharistic devotion and of organized religious life for women, and as the first bishop of the Changanacherry vicariate after the 1911 rearrangement of the Malabar vicariates. A cause for his beatification has been introduced and he is commonly styled Servant of God; he has not been beatified or canonized.