Who is Devasahayam Pillai, the first Indian layman to be declared saint by Pope Francis?

Last week, Vatican city witnessed the first Indian layman being deigned as a saint by the Pope. Devasahayam Pillai became the first Indian layman to be canonised.

Pillai was recommended for the process of Beatification by the Vatican in 2004, at the request of the Kottar diocese, Tamil Nadu Bishop’s Council and the Conference of Catholic Bishops of India. 

Devasahayam Pillai was born into an affluent Nair-caste family at Nattalam in the present-day Kanyakumari district, on April 23, 1712. He went on to serve in the court of Marthanda Varma of Travancore. After meeting a Dutch naval commander at the court, Pillai was baptised in 1745, and assumed the name ‘Lazarus’, meaning ‘God is my help’, reported The Indian Express. 

“His conversion did not go well with the heads of his native religion. False charges of treason and espionage were brought against him and he was divested of his post in the royal administration,” the Vatican said in a note in February 2020.

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According to the Vatican, “while preaching, he particularly insisted on the equality of all people, despite caste differences”, which “aroused the hatred of the higher classes, and he was arrested in 1749”. He was divested of his portfolio in the Travancore administration and was later accused of treason and of divulging state secrets to rivals and Europeans.

On January 14, 1752, Pillai was shot dead in the Aralvaimozhy forest. He is widely considered a martyr, and his mortal remains were interred inside what is now Saint Francis Xavier’s Cathedral in Kottar, Nagercoil.

In 2014, Pope Francis recognised a miracle attributed to Pillai, clearing the path to his canonisation. So what was the miracle? As the website CatholicSaints.info says: “The canonization miracle involved a 24-week fetus who stopped moving and whose heart stopped beating in India in 2013; the mother, who was Catholic and had a devotion to Blessed Lazarus, began praying for his intercession for the baby; within an hour, she felt the baby kicking, tests showed that the heart beat had resumed, and the infant was later born with no complications.” Further details or specifics are not available. 

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He was approved for sainthood in February 2020 for “enduring increasing hardships” after he decided to embrace Christianity, according to the Vatican, which last November announced May 15, 2022, as the date for the ceremony.