“Father Stu”: A Story of Hardship and Redemption

“One of the spiritual overtones present in Father Stu is one important to Christian teaching: the merit of suffering. The Christ-like endurance of suffering is particularly embodied in Long himself.”

Life is meant to be the schoolroom of love, mercy, and forgiveness. In Christian consciousness, it is supposed to be a process of continual conversion, of continually striving for self-improvement through cooperation with God’s Will and grace.

A modern-day exemplar of this conversion process, a man who found the Light of the World amid the world’s darkness, is Father Stuart Long, who lived from 1963 to 2014. Long, a Catholic priest, is the subject of the recent biopic Father Stu, a passion project that came to fruition through the collaboration of Hollywood Catholics Mark Wahlberg and Mel Gibson.

In everything from temptation to habitual sin, from suppression of vocation to religious hypocrisy, Father Stu, which was released last month and was written and directed by Rosalind Ross, is starkly authentic. It cuts deep, remaining raw and realistic throughout. It is the best newly released film this writer has seen in the better half of a decade.

In real life, Stuart Long was athletic from an early age, proving himself a wrestler and an excellent football player during his high school years. Father Stu focuses on his amateur boxing career in adulthood, imagery of which is brought up repeatedly throughout the film.

Stu is a fighter, and he has to prove that time and again—as he seeks a new job, as he pursues love, as he proceeds to enter seminary despite a chorus of No’s, as he wrestles with the effects of inclusion body myositis, as he contends for priestly ordination. It is an uphill battle all the way.