Six Days at Muringoor

The first thing to fix about the Muringoor Divine Retreat Centre is that a retreat here is not a visit. It is six days, residential, on a fixed timetable, in a hall with a great many other people, and you arrive and leave on the days everybody else arrives and leaves. Almost everything that is interesting about the place follows from that single constraint.

The clock

The centre publishes two different weekly clocks because it runs two campuses on opposite sides of National Highway 544. On the English campus, it states, retreats “begin every week on Sunday at 10 am and conclude on Friday at 2 pm”. On the Malayalam campus they “begin every Sunday at 2 pm and end on Friday at 8 am”. The centre’s own home page gives the English cycle slightly differently — Sunday 10 am to Friday 1 pm — and rather than choose between two statements from the same organisation we print both and suggest you confirm when you register.

The staggering is not decoration. Two intakes of that size cannot arrive on the same road at the same hour, and the four-hour offset between the campuses on Sunday and the six-hour offset on Friday are what make the highway and the railway halt work at all. It is the timetable of a transport operation as much as a religious one.

Seven languages at once

Retreats run simultaneously in seven languages, in separate halls: English, Malayalam, Konkani, Hindi, Kannada, Tamil and Telugu. That list is the reach of the place expressed in the least sentimental way available. Konkani means Goa and coastal Karnataka; Telugu means the Andhra country; Hindi means the whole north. Malayalam Wikipedia’s article on Chalakkudy notes that people come to the Potta and Muringoor retreat centres not only from across India but from neighbouring countries, and the language list is what that sentence looks like on a noticeboard.

The English retreats were not the original programme. The centre’s own timeline puts Fr Augustine Vallooran’s assignment to the English work in 1990 and the start of regular weekly English retreats in 1991 — two years after the Muringoor campus opened. The other languages came afterwards. Whatever else this is, it grew outward from a Malayalam preaching ministry rather than being designed as an international operation.

What the six days contain

The published shape of a day is short to describe and long to live: the Eucharist, Eucharistic adoration, preaching, testimony, praise and worship, confession available throughout, and personal spiritual counselling. There are no excursions in the programme, no sightseeing and no free afternoons. A traveller who arrives with the modern sense of the word “retreat” in mind — a quiet room, a walk by the river, some silence — has come to the wrong institution. This is six days of large-hall preaching and liturgy, in company, from early to late.

Accommodation and dining are provided on campus for participants. The centre also states that special accommodation will be provided for the bedridden if it is informed in advance, and that medical facilities including an ambulance service are available on request. That detail tells you something the programme does not: a substantial share of the people here are ill, or are accompanying someone who is, and the buildings are organised around that.

The specialised weeks

Over the ordinary weekly cycle the centre lays a published calendar of themed retreats — Inner Healing, Couples, Family Healing, a Lenten series running most weeks through February and March, a Passover retreat around Holy Week, Divine Mercy, Pentecost, Eucharistic Healing, a National Youth Retreat and an International Youth Retreat, a retreat for priests, religious and lay leaders, and an International Bishops, Priests and Religious Retreat in October. On the Malayalam campus a children’s retreat called the Jesteen runs every week. The dates move with the church calendar each year, so treat any list as this year’s only.

The numbers, and what they are worth

The centre states that it receives “an average of 5000 retreatants every week” and that “over 10 million pilgrims from all over the world have attended retreats here”. It states that it runs “5 charitable homes with over 2000 residents” and feeds “over 3000 residents of the Retreat Centre and its charitable homes”. Every one of those is the institution’s own figure. We could find no independent audit of any of them, and we say so rather than launder them into neutral prose.

We print them anyway, because refusing every figure would understate the place far more badly than the figures could overstate it. Something here moves several thousand people a week through a Thrissur village, keeps a railway halt in business, and has done so for three decades. The exact multiple is the institution’s claim; the order of magnitude is visible from the highway on a Sunday.

The part nobody mentions

Sharing the campus with the retreat halls are five residential charitable homes: the Divine Mercy Home for the aged; St Mary’s Home for destitute women, which also runs a crèche for abandoned children; the Samaritan Home for school-going children aged three to seventeen; the Shantipuram Care Centre for the mentally ill, begun in 2001; a de-addiction centre; and St Vincent Aids Home. These are people’s permanent homes. They are not part of anything a visitor should walk into, and they are the reason the place is a social-care establishment as much as a preaching one.

The centre is known above all for healing, and it would be dishonest to describe it without saying so. What can be reported is what the institution and its retreatants say: that people come ill and expect to be healed, that testimony of healing is a scheduled element of every retreat, and that the services are broadcast on Catholic channels including Divine TV and Goodness TV. We do not repeat any healing claim as established fact and we are in no position to assess one. But the expectation is the engine of the whole operation, it is held sincerely by very large numbers of people, and a description that leaves it out has described something else.

For a traveller not here for the retreat, the honest answer is that there is little to see. Come on a Sunday morning or a Friday midday and stand near Divine Nagar or on the highway shoulder, and the thing itself — an entire week’s intake arriving or leaving at once — is in front of you.