Why they don't want any good news about the Catholic Church over here

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Abbeyleix Church Latin Mass Prayers

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He agreed, but then started shifting uncomfortably in his chair and looking at his watch; he missed the point entirely.

Our documentary isn’t about the Church. It’s about one man, a unique person who dedicated his entire life(not just a few summers) to helping people in a completely impoverished land. He built countless clinics, schools and churches, and cultivated farms for and with people who had nothing – and after 41 years of hard work, he was unexpectedly murdered.

His close friends described him as a man who never wore a new item of clothing in his entire adult life, as a man who never drank alcohol but was always the first one to get the ‘song and dance’ going at parties. I was impressed to hear a radio interview in which this Roman Catholic priest talked about how he was heartened to see more support for gay marriage in recent years.

Henry David Thoreau once wrote, ‘When were the good and the brave ever in a majority?... Each one who there laid down his life for the poor and oppressed was a picked man, culled out of many thousands, if not millions.’

Doesn’t this one good man, culled of millions, deserve to have his story told– and heard? Doesn’t his brutal death warrant an investigation beyond the paltry one that the local police are willing to give him(they’re calling it armed robbery, even though his attackers tied him and beat him, only to come away with a mobile phone and an undetermined amount of paperwork)?

If we could shed light on this one man’s death, and life, I thought, perhaps we would come away with answers – or at least meaningful questions – about land and tribal conflicts, and political corruption in the country where he was killed.

But apparently these concepts just aren’t salacious enough for modern viewers, or at least weren’t enough to convince my funding representative to finance the completion of our film.
Thus, after my miserable meeting, I almost gave in to the temptation to let my old friend Rejection persuade me to lose faith in the world at large.

It’s always the boy who says he’ll always be there for you that’s never there when you call. It’s always the so-called independent thinkers who end up being as bland as beige when challenged to consider a new idea. And it’s always fools like me who are disappointed for believing in them, time and time again.

In a haze of heartbreak, I called my best friend and begged her to give me perspective.

‘You’re at one of those critical crossroads. The question isn’t whether this one person likes your project. It’s, do you believe in it? I believe in it, and I know you do, too. So you have to choose to either continue to work on this, no matter what they say, or drop the project after all of your work.’

Before we hung up, she added, ‘It’ll all work out. Trust me. You just have to believe.’

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