There Be Dragons: A film that shows that forgiveness can change the future

By Diane Thunder Schlosser in Enerpub

Joffe deftly explains that There Be Dragons is about “bringing love to the world --- the absence of love and what that does. When loves goes it leaves a vacuum – and that vacuum can fill with very many unpleasant things: fear, hatred, despair….This movie is made for all human beings with the sure knowledge that all human beings count – all human beings have value -- and all human beings, as St. Josemaria would say, are capable of being saints…”

Although this is not strictly about recently canonized St. Josemaria Escriva per se, he does figure prominently, and we see vignettes of his life as a young priest and a glimpse of the early days of Opus Dei -- his vision of the Universal Call to Holiness 30 years before Vatican II. In the aftermath and angst over the priest scandals, There Be Dragons sets before us a model of the priesthood that needs to be re-embraced. When was the last time Hollywood produced a movie about a priest – a real priest?

Not a vampire-chasing vengeful priest. Not a sensationalized exorcist. Not a fictitious albino ‘monk’ or even a crooning Bing Crosby priest, but a real priest! This generation is privileged to know of a priest who lived in our lifetime and has been canonized in our lifetime, yet St. Josemaria is not just a saint for members of Opus Dei. He is not just a saint for the people of Spain. He has been raised to the high altars of the Church and canonized a saint for all of us as a model of heroic virtue for the 21st century. As Joffe explains,

“Here is a man who, in a time of civil strife, civil war – when God appeared to be silent – was an example of someone going through a spiritual crisis who never lost the sense that each human being is a saint, that every human being is deserving of love, and he lived that. That is saintliness. Those subjects are worthy of honest storytelling. Josemaria also claimed that ordinary people were quite capable of being saints – and I think this kind of heroic forgiveness is what he was talking about….(it is) what offers room for hope. But the price is high: It takes a deep sense of what it is to be fully human…and, yes, heroic resolve not to be caught up in prevailing hatreds, but to fight them with unremitting love.” (www.mercatornet.com/sheila_liaugminas/view/8815/)

Read the entire article here.