Our Lady of Presentation Church, Mathapuram

Our Lady of Presentation Church, or Punitha Kanikkai Matha Church, is in Mathapuram, near Karungal in Kanyakumari district, under the Diocese of Kuzhithurai. The village was formerly Villapatty, on a footpath from Kottar to Trivandrum used by merchants and travellers, who rested their loads at a stone sumaithangai. In 1978 a visiting bishop saw a cross here inscribed with the Roman letters INRI and suggested it might date from the time of St. Thomas.

Local people prayed at the grotto in times of sickness and disaster, and enlarged it with a coconut-thatched building that became a chapel. In 1949 a German-made wooden statue of Mary was installed, people began calling her Kanikkai Madha, and the village took the name Mathapuram. A concrete church followed in 1994, and the present one, begun in 2015, was inaugurated on 11 August 2017.