A Catholic movie reviewer noted that the new film Padre Pio, directed by Abel Ferrara and starring Shia LaBeouf, is “rated R, featuring extreme profanity, nudity, and violence [and] is completely inappropriate as a resource for young people or a parish group seeking to learn more about the life of the saint.”
CLICK https://www.youtube.com/shorts/nAxJaj8DAP0 to see a brief, highly objectionable and fictitious clip.
Meanwhile, professional movie reviewers variously panned it as “a dull slog” of a film, “like bad community theatre,” “occasionally rank”, and “a work of deluded, semi-improvisational navel-gazing.”
I was personally put off by the violence and heavily political scenes in the trailer. One reviewer noted that “the film praised communism … as almost an ally of Christianity, represented by Saint Pio.” Another decried the “endless debates over worker’s rights and socialism … feel oddly hollow, in part because Ferrara inexplicably directs an Italian cast to speak in English for no discernable reason, especially when LaBeouf doesn’t even try to put on an accent himself. It comes off clunky.”
[58:22] – In the video above, James Majewski and Thomas Mirus contend that conscientious Catholics must not see this movie which, according to them, is ruined by a pornographic and sacrilegious scene. One commenter wrote, “to suggest that Pio was given such a vision of Our Blessed Mother is outright fiction. Jesus would never permit a demon to defame his Holy Mother in that way.”
Another reviewer notes that the film never mentions St. Pio’s stigmata. Wait, wut? They don’t talk about his stigmata AT ALL?! The man bore all of the wounds of Christ on his body for fifty years! How could they not mention it?!
The stigmata on his hands and feet began causing him pain on September 7, 1910, in the first year of his ministry. On September 20, 1918, they became visible. In the center of his hands and feet, he had incredibly painful and bloody wounds about ¾ inch in diameter. The stigmata stayed the same for 50 years and never became infected, even though there were bloody, open wounds.
Padre Pio wore gloves most of the time, taking them off only to celebrate Holy Mass. In addition to the visible wounds on his hands and feet, Padre Pio also invisibly bore the pains of all of the other wounds Christ received during His passion.
- https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/padre-pio-movie-review-2023
- https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-reviews/shia-labeouf-abel-ferrara-padre-pio-venice-1235209338/
- https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/watching-shia-labeouf-do-padre-pio
- https://www.padrepiodapietrelcina.com/en/stigmata-padre-pio/
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Padre_Pio (film)
polination.blog 