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About the film

The project

Fourth Week Films and the New Orleans Province of the Society of Jesus present Xavier: Missionary & Saint, a new PBS-style documentary film on the life of the famed 16th-century Jesuit missionary Francis Xavier. Narrated by Liam Neeson Xavier tells the missionary's compelling story through dramatizations, interviews, contemporary location shots, paintings and engravings, maps, and most importantly, the extant letters of Xavier.

The film features interviews with distinguished scholars of Jesuit and Renaissance history including Ingrid Rowland (Notre Dame University), Andrew Ross (University of Edinburgh), Lourdes del Costa (University of Goa, India), Anthony Ucerler, SJ (Jesuit Historical Institute in Rome), Gauvin Bailey (Boston College) and John O'Malley, SJ, (Georgetown University).

The story

The son of minor nobility in northern Spain, Francis Xavier seemed destined for the prosaic life of a country nobleman or minor cleric. At age 18, his parents sent him to Paris to get a university education and it was here that the course of Xavier's life was forever altered. During his second year at Paris, Xavier was assigned a roommate named Ignatius Loyola, another Spanish nobleman who had undergone a radical conversion after a near-fatal wound on the battlefield. Under Ignatius' influence, Xavier and five other students decided to commit themselves to radical service to God and others. These men would eventually become the first Jesuits. Their life and work would profoundly alter a Renaissance Catholic Church in need of reform.

The first Jesuits envisioned themselves as a band of missionaries willing to go wherever the need was greatest. Xavier, even before the Jesuits were officially founded, was sent on the arduous journey to India as a missionary. Arriving in 1542 in Goa, Xavier spent the next ten years preaching the gospel and tending to the sick, elderly, and uneducated. His zeal took him to hundreds of remote islands and villages, where, out of a deep respect for God's family, he learned their customs and cultures with hopes of more effectively explaining Christianity. Xavier gradually began to understand that the Christian faith need not - indeed should not - be transmitted to other cultures in the trappings of European culture.  This recognition put him at odds with the established secular and religious powers of Western Europe who equated the expansion of Christianity with the expansion of European culture and political power.  This recognition would also significantly change the way Europe and Asia related to one another.  Xavier's pioneering attempts at enculturation inspired later generation of Jesuits and inaugurated a far-reaching cultural exchange between Europe and the Far East.

Today, Xavier's legacy is ubiquitous.  Japanese schoolchildren learn that Xavier was the first westerner to be immersed in their culture and the first to introduce Japanese culture to Europe.  In many parts of India, Xavier is revered by Hindus, Muslims, and Christians alike for his love of and care for the Indian people.  And in Indonesia, a small but vigorous Christian church looks to Xavier as its founding father.