This year will be marked by successive homage Brazilian people will pay to the late medium Francisco Cândido Xavier in the year of the centenary of his birth. Born on April 2, 1910 and christened with the name of Francisco de Paula Cândido, Chico Xavier became famous not only as a medium and one of the largest publishers in the history of Spiritualism, but as a true apostle of love and charity. Born in Pedro Leopoldo, metropolitan region of Belo Horizonte, his parents were named Maria João de Deus and João Cândido Xavier. Educated in the Catholic faith, Chico had his first contact with the Spiritist Doctrine in 1927, during an obsessive process, which affected one of his sisters. He proceeded to study and develop their abilities, which, as he reported in a note in the book Parnassus from Beyond the Grave, only gained greater clarity at the end of 1931. Spiritism is is the belief that spirits of the departed are all around us and that the physical world is influenced by, and influences, the spirit world. Much of its main ideas are in The Spirits Book, which was compiled by Allan Kardec in France in the mid 19th century. The Spiritist Doctrine was taken to Brazil by Brazilians educated in France and there it took hold with the general population.
