The Lost History of Christianity: The Thousand-Year Golden Age of the Church in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia—and How It Died

by Philip Jenkins

One moving documentary from the 1990s, Otaiya, actually allows us to hear very old believers reciting Catholic prayers that first came to the region over four hundred years ago, some in Church Latin and sixteenth-century Portuguese. They pray “Ame Maria karassa binno domisu terikobintsu,” a recollection of “Ave Maria gratia plena, dominus tecum, benedicta…” And they lovingly display a fragment of a silk robe once worn by one of the martyred Fathers. The film shows us the last two members of the indigenous hereditary priesthood, both frail men in their nineties, the distant successors of Saint Francis Xavier and the Jesuit pioneers.33