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Sister Maria Philo, wearing a green surgical mask, is busy tending to the poor, injured fisher folk who until the day after Christmas plied the shallow waters off Nagapattinam for prawn and other fish. This city of 200,000, adjacent to the again—placid Bay of Bengal, has turned into an open-air morgue.

As Sister Maria moves purposefully amid the rubble, the odor of decaying flesh and the choking smoke of pyres from mass burials and cremations prompt nausea. Christian volunteers and pastors bury all the dead. Government workers have refused to touch the badly decaying corpses. Before the bodies are disposed of, pastors take their pictures, to be used later to identify them.

Sister Maria struggles to convey how she copes. "I couldn't pray for two to three days. Now, slowly, I am beginning to accept God's will."

The tsunamis following the massive December 26 earthquake off distant Indonesia's coast hit some areas of South Asia harder than others. In southeastern Tamil Nadu state, rotten corpses continue to surface, and hundreds of people are still missing. With the death toll in India surpassing 10,000, Tamil Nadu has 7,707 dead officially, of which 6,000 were in Nagapattinam, famous for the Shrine Basilica of Our Lady of Good Health in Vailankanni. Locals say the true figure is much higher.

As you enter Nagapattinam in the early morning, you will see masked health workers sprinkling disinfectants from tin boxes on the roadsides. Hundreds of homeless people sit on the roads all day long.

Local Christians, many of them Catholics, did not escape the mindless fury of the tsunamis.

• Eight miles away from the shrine, the 3,800-member Church of Our Lady of Lourdes lost 36 members—33 of them children. Two nuns visiting the church also died. Several more fisher-folk church members are missing. Many of the area fishermen belong to the country's despised Dalits.
• About 175 children were buried in a single pit in Kanikkamatha Church, in the nearby Kolachel area. Though exact numbers are not available, Father Gomes said that 70 percent of those affected in the region are Christians. Christians constitute the majority of fishermen here.
• Another 300 Christians were reported killed while attending a religious service in Tamil Nadu's Kottar area. Nagapattinam's Saint Peter's Church lost 10 of its 250 members, with three others missing.
• At the Shrine Basilica of Our Lady of Good Health in Vailankanni, more than 800 people—there to celebrate Christmas, including 400 Christian pilgrims and many local Christian fishermen—died.

A few steps from the grisly scene on the shore, church rector P. Xavier sits in his office, recounting the horror. One floor down, hundreds of frantic people comb through 400 photos of the dead the church has displayed, hoping they will not see the face of a missing loved one.

Father Xavier struggles to keep his anger in check. "The bodies kept floating and rotting on the beach for three days, and no official came despite our repeated requests," Xavier tells CT. "The villagers had died or fled the area in fear. So we pastors and church volunteers buried 600 bodies in three days.

"Some of the corpses were so decayed that, if you tried to lift them, the limbs would come off. So we had to bury about 200 on the beach itself. We hired nine bulldozers to dig graves. … Many bodies were mutilated beyond recognition."

Shocked Christians gathered to pray and light candles for the victims' souls. Xavier notes "constant questioning" among priests and laity about how a good God can allow such a calamity. At the same time, many share tales of survival. Father A. Xavier of Our Lady of Lourdes says when a church family saw the wave sweeping ashore, members started praying. Like the angel of death in Egypt, the water passed by without entering their house, and all were spared.

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February 2005, Vol. 49, No. 2