"Inspired to love": San Josemaría 2.0

May 5, 2011

Tags: Love, Internet, Video

A huge number of different people find inspiration in St Josemaria’s message. A new documentary, available on the internet, aims to show something of the variety of people, and the ways in which his message is applied in all sorts of different circumstances, now in the 21st century. The documentary is called “Inspired to Love”, produced by Digito Identidad and directed by Juan Martin Esratty.

“Inspired to Love” lets 22 people, not all Catholics, talk in their own ways about St Josemaria’s life and message and what it has meant to them, in terms of learning to understand others better, and trying to make the world a better place. They come across as ordinary, genuine people just like anyone else, who have met a message and a spirit that has changed their lives. Their stories are honest, original, often humorous.

Their ideas are interspersed with clips from filmed gatherings in which St Josemaria also speaks for himself, giving an idea of what he was like and the way he interacted with people.

It’s up to you

Pierluigi Bartolomei

One of the people featured in the documentary is Pierluigi Bartolomei from Rome, a teacher and theatre producer. “When I was at school, I used to think that we could change things by joining a group of people, people of my sort of age, who were politically active, extremely left-wing, and the methods to use were organising marches, fighting the police, throwing stones, setting fire to cars, and sorting things out above all by violence, by bashing others, the law of the strongest. Then I happened to watch a film of St Josemaria Escriva, the founder of Opus Dei. It was in Spanish. I don’t speak Spanish. I didn’t understand a word he said. Not a word. But at the end of the film, miraculously, everything became clear. I was seeing beneath that cassock a heart that made him fly up to the heights, and I understood that up till then my life, to put it bluntly, had been that of a farmyard animal.”

Maria Brown, director of Baytree Centre, a social inclusion project, explains: “I used to judge a lot of people, because when you’re a scientist, you analyse situations and draw conclusions after the experiments, so you are used to doing that in your daily life. But when you deal with people, it’s a different aspect… and Saint Josemaria, his teachings, I try to apply them and I try not to pass judgments on people’s lives, or people’s behaviour, but try to put myself in the shoes of that person and see how I would actually be acting if I was in that position.”

The 28-minute documentary is framed by a woman from Finland talking about what happened to her when her son became a Catholic and then joined Opus Dei.

Others come in with comments like, “I realised that God is a personal God, and then when you feel that you have a contact with this personal God, you can never look back.” “St Josemaria influenced me to live the Christian way of life, and that is where the turning-point in my life was. God was very close to me, I used to learn about him through books, through the Bible, but I never felt that he was so close to me that I can feel him, I can talk to him. St Josemaria really gave me the closeness with God… I could walk with him, I could talk with him!”