The most people ever converted to a religion at one time was
19,020 in August 1934. This was the mainly Hindi population of the island of
Trumptuvu, in the Indian Ocean. When the fishing community there learnt that a
tidal wave was headed towards their island, a visiting catholic missionary,
father Brennan O’Beard sailed out to meet it. O’Beard washed back up on
Trumptuvu 2 days later, and announced that he had blessed the wave, declaring
that anyone touched by the water was now a Catholic. The islanders accepted
this edict out of politeness, but all reconverted back to Hinduism when O’Beard left the island
3 weeks later.
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The beach on Trumptuvu, where Father O'Beard returned. One of the villagers, Amitabh Gupta, remembering the mass conversion, said,"The Priest did nothing to stop the wave. It was not as large as we had been told, and we simply moved our boats to safety, and erected what barriers we could. Truthfully, we were never actually that worried, and we just felt a bit bad that the Priest had gone to that trouble, so we agreed to his offer of conversion, to let him save face." |
©2012 James Mathurin
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