A new movie about St. Padre Pio, starring Catholic convert Shia LaBeouf will be available for public viewing beginning June 2.
The movie will be released and distributed in North America by Gravitas Ventures, according to deadline.com. The company did not respond in time for publication to inquiries about whether the film would be released in theaters and through streaming services.
One of the most popular Catholic saints of the 20th century, St. Pio of Pietrelcina, commonly known as Padre Pio, was a Capuchin Franciscan friar, priest, and mystic.
Padre Pio is mostly known for his deep wisdom about prayer and peace; his stigmata; miraculous reports of his bilocation; being physically attacked by the devil, and mastering the spiritual life.
The film premiered at the Venice Film Festival in September 2022 and played again at the Mammoth Film Festival in early March 2023.
LaBeouf, who plays the role of Padre Pio, spent four months living with Capuchin friars while preparing for the film.
The film features a subplot about the rise of fascism in Italy, AP reported, focusing on the 1920 massacre of 14 people in the village of San Giovanni Rotondo near the monastery where Padre Pio lived.
Abel Ferrara, who had made a documentary about Padre Pio before working on the movie the film’s director, told AP he felt that the intersection between the saint’s spiritual battles and the political bloodshed at San Giovanni Rotondo made sense as a scope for the film.
“I thought the confluence between the massacre and his stigmata both happening in the same place at the same time … I mean how could you not make a movie about that?” he told the AP.
Ferrara told AP that Church officials and Capuchin friars were supportive of the film project despite his having produced pornography and extremely violent films early in his career.
“Given the list of films I’d made you’d be wondering,” Ferrara said.
“It’s just that these cats have got that optimistic take,” Ferrara said of the Church. “Don’t judge someone on their worst moment.”
LaBeouf made headlines in August after he revealed in an 80-minute-long interview with Bishop Robert Barron of the Diocese of Winona-Rochester, Minnesota, and Word on Fire, that his on-screen portrayal of Padre Pio led him to a love of the Catholic faith.
“I start feeling a physical effect from it,” he said of going to Communion. “I start feeling a reprieve, and it starts feeling, like, regenerative, and [I] start enjoying it to such a degree I don’t want to miss it, ever.”
LaBeouf, 36, says he was agnostic before finding God. More about his conversion, his devotion to the rosary, and the Traditional Latin Mass can be read here.
You can watch a trailer for the film below.
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Baltimore, Md., Jul 29, 2019 / 11:35 am (CNA).- Archbishop William E. Lori of Baltimore issued a statement Saturday rebutting a tweet from President Donald Trump that claimed that the city is infested with both crime and rats.
Mother Elvira, the founder of the Comunità Cenacolo, based her efforts to help young people struggling with addiction around the concept of radical trust in God’s mercy and providence. / Courtesy of the Comunità Cenacolo
National Catholic Register, Aug 5, 2023 / 13:00 pm (CNA).
Mother Elvira Petrozzi, who founded Comunità Cenacolo in 1983 to provide hope and healing to those suffering from addiction, died on Aug. 3 in the formation house and residence of her congregation in Saluzzo, Italy. She was 86.
Her death, following a long illness, came just weeks after thousands of people gathered in Saluzzo, a hilltop town in Italy’s northwest Piedmont region about an hour’s drive south of Turin, to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Cenacolo Community’s founding there in an abandoned home on July 16, 1983.
In the decades since, the community has grown to encompass 72 Cenacolo houses in 20 countries, including four in the United States.
Mother Elvira called the Cenacolo a “School of Life” because it took people off the streets and gave them a “rebirth” that was “based on a simple, family-oriented, orderly life” with the foundation of prayer, physical labor, discipline, and fraternal sharing.
“How could I invent a story like this? Everything happened without me even realizing it,” she once remarked.
“I dove into God’s mercy and I rolled up my sleeves to love, love, love … and serve!” she said. “I am the first to surprise myself with what has happened and what is happening in the life of the Cenacolo Community. It’s a work of God, the Holy Spirit, and of Mary.”
Bishop Robert Baker, bishop emeritus of Birmingham, Alabama, first met Mother Elvira in 1991. The two developed a close friendship and together they co-founded four Comunità Cenacolos in the U.S. Southwest, including one near Hanceville, Alabama.
Baker was among Mother Elvira’s many friends, supporters, and community members who were able to visit with her in her final days.
“I had the blessing of being invited to come to be at her bedside,” he told the National Catholic Register, CNA’s partner news outlet. “I was with her and I was able to give her a blessing.”
Humble beginnings
Born Rita Petrozzi, Mother Elvira was born in Sora, Italy, in 1937 and grew up in a poor family, taking the name Elvira upon entering the Sisters of Charity of St. Jeanne Antide Thouret as a teenager.
It wasn’t until 27 years later that she felt inspired to help young addicts and other youth to change their lives. Rooted in her Catholic faith and God’s love for every person, her methods were so effective that they led to others wanting a Comunità Cenacolo established in their region.
Prior to meeting her, Baker founded a drug addiction center called Our Lady of Hope Community in St. Augustine, Florida. Then visiting Rome when he was rector of the Cathedral Basilica of St. Augustine, he learned of Mother Elvira, spoke with her, and at his invitation agreed to establish a Cenacolo community with her entire program at Our Lady of Hope in 1992. The two friends went on to co-found two other houses in the St. Augustine area and a fourth house in Alabama.
Baker celebrated one of the Masses for the thousands of people attending the 40th anniversary celebration in Saluzzo. In his homily, he reflected on the time when he arranged to use an ornamental nursery to raise funds for the Cenacolo program in Florida, but when community members arrived from Italy they explained that Mother Elvira had instructed them to rely instead on divine providence.
“It was the result of her own closeness to the Lord in the Eucharist, which enabled her to see the immensity of God’s love. And if God loves us so immensely, he will provide for us,” he said.
After 30 years, no one has gone hungry in that Florida house or any of the community’s houses. “The point being, she was right,” Baker said.
The daily schedule at these houses includes Mass, eucharistic adoration, Marian devotion with three rosaries minimum a day, and devotion to St. Joseph. Every day members pray simply: “St. Joseph, provide for us.”
“The heart of it is, of course, the Eucharist,” Baker explained.
“Part of Elvira’s training is to divest to get rid of the stuff you don’t need,” he said. “So, the divesting, the trust in divine providence, and then … the Eucharist, praying before the Lord. That’s where her greatest strength was — the Eucharist, where she had all these insights. [You] have to have the sense of God’s immense love, which she had from praying before the Eucharist. And then because you know God loves you immensely, he will provide for you.”
When Baker visited Mother Elvira shortly before her death, he noted upon entering the house a mosaic on the floor that spells out the words “Dio Provvede” (God Provides).
‘Consumed with God’s love’
Florida residents Sean and Elaine Corrigan, who met Mother Elvira in 2000, lived in her community for some time and served in its missions in Brazil.
The couple credits her for saving their marriage.
“She had an extraordinary impact on our lives and on our marriage,” Elaine Corrigan told the Register. “Mother Elvira was a person fully in love with her Savior. She knew, she accepted, and she believed completely in his merciful love, and her great desire was to share him with others.
“I wanted to run after her and soak up all that she had,” she continued. “When we met Mother Elvira, we knew we had encountered a woman completely consumed with the love of God. She knew in the core of her being that he could and would heal people. She shared this hope and mercy with everyone she met.”
Albino Aragno, who started with the Cenacolo more than 30 years ago and today is the director of Comunità Cenacolo America, said Mother Elvira taught him many valuable lessons.
“Mother Elvira always encouraged me. She reminded me that life is precious and that life needs to be lived fully … to never be afraid to do God’s will, and always trust in him,” he said.
“Because of this, I can say that in all these years I can see that our community has kept on going even through so many difficulties, because good always prevails!”
Albino’s wife, Joyce, said Mother Elvira had a profound effect on her from the very beginning.
“Mother Elvira said, ‘Lord, let me know your will in the moment you want me to do it.’ This pierced my heart the first time I heard it and moved me to try to live every moment of my life in surrender and abandonment to his will, as Jesus reveals it at that moment,” she explained.
“It’s so radically opposed to control and trusting ‘in my own understanding,’ as the Psalmist says — my own intellect, perception, and analysis. Jesus calls me to live totally in the moment, not depending on myself.”
Pope Francis paid tribute to the Comunità Cenacolo on its 40th anniversary following his July 16 Angelus reflection.
“I send my heartfelt greeting to the Cenacolo Community, which has been a place of hospitality and human promotion for 40 years,” the pope said. “I bless Mother Elvira, the bishop of Saluzzo, and all the fraternity and friends. What you do is good, and it is good that you exist! Thank you!”
Baker said he observed during a recent Mass how “in periods of the Church there are great saints that get us through the eras in which we live.”
He pointed to St. Benedict in the fourth century, the Dominicans and Franciscans in the 13th century during the Albigensian heresy, and St. Ignatius and the Jesuits in the 16th century at the time of the Reformation.
Lara Al-Sayegh, a Catholic from Gaza, collapsed and died of heatstroke as she and her mother tried to leave Gaza and find safe haven in Egypt on April 24, 2024. The 19-year-old lived in northern Gaza and the family had already lost their father and husband when he died at Gaza’s Latin Holy Family Church due to a lack of adequate medical care. / Credit: Fady Al-Sayegh
ACI MENA, Apr 30, 2024 / 16:30 pm (CNA).
Among the heartbreaking stories to emerge from the war in Gaza is the death of a young Catholic woman named Lara Al-Sayegh. The 19-year-old Gazan perished while fleeing with her mother from the northern Gaza Strip to the south in a desperate attempt to reach Egypt and find safe haven.
Midway through their arduous journey, Al-Sayegh succumbed to severe fatigue, lack of water, and fatal heatstroke. Tragically, her father had already been lost during the war when he died at Gaza’s Latin Holy Family Church due to a lack of adequate medical care.
A brother’s anguished testimony
In an exclusive interview with ACI MENA, CNA’s Arabic-language news partner, Al-Sayegh’s brother, Fady Al-Sayegh, who has resided in Egypt since earlier this year, shared his pain at receiving the devastating news about his sister.
“It was an unexpected moment when I got the heartbreaking update through Father Iusuf Assad, the pastor of the Holy Family Latin Church in Gaza,” Fady recounted. “He sent me a condolence message. I asked, ‘Condolences for whom?’ His answer was, ‘It’s Lara, your sister.'”
“I couldn’t believe it…How could I believe it?” Fady said, his voice thick with grief. “I asked my brother Khalil, hoping against hope that the news was false. But the painful truth was inescapable. Just yesterday, it seems, Lara was here with us. We were talking, planning for a promising future together. I was waiting for her on the Egyptian side of the border. Everything we dreamed of was within our grasp, and suddenly…we lost all that we had, as if it had never been.”
Fady’s sorrow is compounded by the plans they had made. “We had hopes of attending university together, as Lara aspired to study journalism and media in order to give voice to the untold stories,” he said.
A journey cut tragically short
According to the testimony of Lara’s mother, Fady explained that on Tuesday, April 23, both Lara and her mother’s names were included on a list of those permitted to cross into Egypt from Gaza. They decided to leave the following day, heading to the Netzarim Corridor, which separates northern Gaza from the south and remains under Israeli control.
“They were in a car driving them to a specific point in the south,” Fady explained. “From there, they had to walk on foot until reaching the Rafah Crossing into Egypt. Lara was walking briskly and quickly, but she suddenly stumbled and collapsed to the ground. Some people tried to revive her, thinking she had merely fainted due to the extreme heat. But the painful reality was that Lara had died.”
Their mother also fainted from the trauma and is now recovering. Fady noted with great sorrow that Lara was buried in southern Gaza, far from her church home, and her funeral has not yet been held.
Fady blamed some Arabic media outlets for ignoring the plight of Gaza’s small Christian minority amid their harsh living conditions, including killings, loss of property, displacement, and forced migration. The ancient Christian community there has endured continuous suffering and is on the brink of extinction due to migration, displacement, and now the war.
Fady also expressed hope that the world would work towards achieving justice and peace in the region. He called on churches around the globe to pray for Gaza, to be a voice for the oppressed, and to help raise awareness about the struggle of minority communities in the area.
It’s about time!!! We’ve waited through the word on fire interview, the European release & nothing til now
Worst movie ever. Learned very little about this Saint. Story line was so fragmented and disjointed. I especially did not like the cursing and nudity.