To the right of the Town Hall on the south side of the square is the white plaster façade of the Jesuit Church of St. Francis Xavier. Nearby former monastery buildings converted into a Jesuit high school in 1991.

The Jesuit community is from 1639. The friars purchased Perkūnas House for their own needs, and began construction of the church in the square in 1666.

The sanctuary caught fire in 1732 and was only consecrated in 1759. The late baroque interior of that period is manifest in the sole surviving high altar of Jesus Crucified, made of dark red and grey artificial marble according to a design by Tomas Žebrauskas. A monastery and college appeared in 1761-1768.

Although the pope abolished the Jesuit Order in 1773, the monks stayed in Kaunas until 1787. Upon their departure they left their property to the Franciscans. In 1825, after the side altars were torn down and the high altar covered with an iconostasis, the sanctuary became an Orthodox church (Alexander of Neva Cathedral from 1843).

Return to the Jesuits

The Jesuits recovered it when they returned to Lithuania from Germany after the First World War. They added two floors to the monastery and college buildings, and made the college into a boys' high-school. A technical college took over the buildings during the Soviet occupation.

The church became a sports hall in 1949 (the crypt underneath the high altar became a sauna, the attic a shooting gallery). The complex returned to the Jesuits once again in 1990. Reconsecration took place in 1992. A plaque on the façade indicates that the poet Adam Mickiewicz taught at the district school in 1891 - 1823.