Father Stu

What follows is a reflection on the movie Father Stu (spoiler alert).  It was provided by writer Joseph Serwach.  I provide his perspective because on a 5 ½ hour flight back from the Azores I watched this movie, and it moved me to tears.  It made me think even more about the priesthood and what compels many men to make such a momentous decision and sacrifice.  

(begin) Father Stu: Mark Wahlberg Shows Us How to Find Our True Destiny.  From fighter to a priest? Stuart Long became a Catholic to get a woman — then he found God, redemptive suffering, great joy

Father Stu, the most inspiring film about the priesthood in half a century, tells the true story of a failed boxer going to Hollywood to be an actor. “We’re not human beings having a spiritual experience. We’re spiritual beings having a human one,” Father Stu explains. Like the best “God’s Plan” stories, one crazy thing leads to another, so it only makes sense looking back years later:

• The “big dream” puts him in a minor job. Trying to pay bills, the non-believer gets a job working at the deli counter of a supermarket, falling for a beautiful woman. She’s passing out church flyers, so he goes to her parish to find her.

• Doing the right thing for the wrong reasons. His family has been angry at God (and each other) since his little brother died as a child. But he becomes a Catholic, going through the RCIA process, so he can go out with her and have a chance to marry her. But he remains a rough guy from a dysfunctional family, winding up in jail for drunk driving.

• The first plot twist: tragedy opens his heart. A deadly motorcycle accident (he’s hit by one car and then a second) nearly kills him. Bloody and hurt in every way, he senses the Blessed Mother at his side. Unfortunately, the doctors think he is unlikely to come out of a coma — except he does after his girlfriend puts the Bible in his hands.

• Struggle kindles new love. Suddenly, his personal relationship with Jesus is so powerful that he knows he must become a priest, so he overcomes resistance from friends, family, and priests to get into a seminary.

• When God wounds us, he brings us closer to him. While overcoming the odds in seminary, he is struck by a terminal disease called inclusion body myositis, which mimics the symptoms of Lou Gehrig’s disease. God doesn’t keep us from pain, but he does transform those emotions.

• God takes suffering, adds love, and creates a more incredible Divine Mercy. Father Stu’s intense struggle now forces his parents to recreate and correct their parental roles, becoming loving parents to their son. And a host of hurting people, from prisoners to the sick, are drawn to this inspiring, suffering priest. They literally stand in line for his advice.

• Finding the Father heals his relationship with his earthly father. Father Stu’s paralysis (he literally must crawl at one point) forces the rebirth of the father-child relationship. Many relationships revive when either a parent or child is dying. Both his parents entered the Church.

• The rough language is there to show all are welcome in this Church, that it’s never “too late” or “out of reach” for anyone

Star Mark Wahlberg financed the film after hearing Father Stu’s story (previously little known outside Montana). The movie, full of salty language and an R-rating, initially met with resistance from Church authorities. But they eventually agreed it was necessary to show that anyone, including the lowest among us, can be transformed.

Screenwriter and director Rosalind Ross told the National Catholic Register: “I hope that it can serve as a comfort to people that it really is never too late to try to repair those bonds. It’s also never too late to change. It’s never too late to seek forgiveness, to self-improve, to seek redemption, whatever you want to call it. It’s never too late to do that.”

Father Stu’s greatest lesson: We live to learn our vocation, God’s calling, and unique plan for our creation

Bishop Robert Barron said that the most important thing we do with our lives is “discerning God’s call for us.” He said the film teaches “the nature of vocation, the purpose of suffering in the Divine Plan, the role of supernatural agency, the dynamics of redemption, and perhaps most thoroughly, the mystery of God’s Providence.”

“I wonder, again, how many devout Christians understand that the discernment of their vocation is the most important psychological and spiritual move that they will ever make, that every other decision they make in their lives is secondary,” Barron said.

Bishop Robert Barron, after seeing “Father Stu,” said there is nothing more important we do in life than finding our vocation, our calling.

The film shows even people going through the most challenging struggles feel great joy at the moments they know God is with them. Father Stu is unyielding to every challenge because of that confidence in God’s Plan for him.

“God’s call, once discerned, is practically irresistible,” Barron stresses. “Once someone knows what God wants for him, he will do anything, overcome any obstacle, face down any opposition, in order to follow that Divine Directive.”

As St. Thomas Aquinas said of God constantly involving himself in the minor details of our lives, God’s Plan “extends to particulars.” Again, Barron points to Psalm 139 as an example:

“O Lord, you have searched me and known me. You know when I sit down and when I rise up; you discern my thoughts from far away. You search out my path and my lying down and are acquainted with all my ways. Even before a word is on my tongue, O Lord, you know it completely. You hem me in, behind and before, and lay your hand upon me” (Palm 139:1–5).

And yet, again and again, most Christians and Catholics wind up thinking like deists, who believe God created the universe and then wholly left us alone and on our own. “I have argued for years that most people in the modern world are functionally deist in their understanding of God,” Barron writes. “This means that they consider God a distant cause, important perhaps in bringing the universe into being, but now essentially uninvolved with his creation. This might have been the philosophical perspective of the leading minds of the 18th century, but it is most assuredly not the perspective of the authors of the Bible.”

Father Stuart Long died on June 9, 2014. He was just 50, yet his bishop thought Long achieved more in seven years as a priest than the bishop had in 40 years, daily showing Christ’s redemptive suffering.

As St. Paul wrote, the “power at work within us is able to accomplish abundantly far more than all we can ask or imagine” (Eph. 3:20). (end)

Deacon David Pierce