St. Joseph Church, Belman

St. Joseph Church stands at Belmannu in Karkala taluk, Udupi district, Karnataka, on the Padubidri-Kudremukh State Highway, 48 km from Mangalore to the north. The place name comes from the Kannada for white soil. It is a Latin-rite parish of about 540 families, with Mass in Konkani and some bilingual Kannada Masses on feast days.

Bishop Pagani allowed a chapel here in 1886, and the Mathias family paid for its seven years of building. Blessed on 10 September 1894, it had mud walls, a hay-thatched roof and no belfry. When that roof weakened, work began in 1922 on a new church, consecrated in 1933. Its early priests also shaped local life: Nicholas Carneiro built the Shirva-Belman road, and Emmanuel Vas opened the first post office in the region. P. L. Bothelho, a musician and poet, later added a Lourdes-type grotto.