I haven’t had an opportunity to see “Cabrini” yet, but my friend Gerard Nadal has, and posted this take on Facebook — a perspective both unique and, I think, important:

Having seen the movie I have to issue a stark warning. If you are looking for The Song of Bernadette: Italian Social Work Edition, you’re gonna be deeply disappointed. This movie ain’t it. If you are looking for a movie about how saints actually look, how they actually move, how ordinary the extraordinary is, and how it’s attainable, then this is the movie to see.

Very little mention of God. No big prayer scenes. No mention of the order’s name until the end. Again, this is not The Song of Bernadette: Italian Social Work Edition.

In 1983 I began working at Covenant House in Times Square. It was 15 years after the first kids showed up at Father Bruce Ritter’s door, and only a couple of years after the agency moved into its main building on 41st Street and 10th Ave. I knew Ritter well, and had he not been an active homosexual who bedded 20 year-olds, he’d be remembered today as New York’s other Cabrini. So, I was there. I was there for 7 years as things were growing exponentially.

How it happened in “Cabrini” is pretty much how it happened at Covenant House. The founders championed the cause of street kids forced into crime and prostitution. Ritter caught the attention of Catholic journalist, Bill Reel, who put him on the map in NYC. And the money flowed in. Then came the politicians. In modus operandi, Ritter and Cabrini were identical. I will add that Ritter did not allow the counseling staff or child care staff to talk religion with the kids. We had a chaplain’s office for that. His fear was that the kids would “prostitute” themselves spiritually if they thought that their care depended on it.

We didn’t talk faith very much at work. We just lived the corporal works of mercy.

So my experience of “Cabrini, ” the movie, took me back to Covenant House in its childhood years. Yes, God’s grace was all about us. His providence was undeniable, as it was with Mother Cabrini. But doing God’s work with street kids and the poorest of the poor requires courage, and grit in abundance. I worked with quite a few saints at Covenant House, people who’ll never be canonized.

“Cabrini” was their story.

Go see it!

Meanwhile, Variety just posted an interview with the movie’s producer that helps put it in a similar context:

While religious folks may connect with Francesca’s devotion to God, [produceer Jonathan] Sanger appreciated the film’s focus on her dogged tenacity, and not just her faith. “It was very important to me that the emphasis of the story wasn’t intended to be a religious, faith-based kind of story about the value of prayer — not that that isn’t valuable. But that wasn’t really what the movie was about,” he says. “The movie was about what you can do yourself, without relying on supernatural forces, just what you can do in the world to make it a better place. And that meant a lot to me.”

He was also compelled by the hopeful message, adding, “I’m at a stage in my own career where I see all kinds of movies, but I’m not terribly interested in leaving a movie theater and wanting to kill myself. That is not my favorite thing to do. And yet, there are a lot of movies that tend to make you feel that way. I mean, I’ll go see them. But I don’t want to make them. So if I’m going to make a movie, it should have some element of hope in the conclusion of the story. And I felt this did.”

Once he began working with screenwriter Rod Barr, their biggest early challenge was landing on the scope of the story. “She did so many things over so much of a period of time that it would be a 10-part miniseries to do a longitudinal story about her,” Sanger says. Thus, they landed on an origin story of her initial arrival in New York. …

… Sanger is effusive in his praise of Angel Studios, citing willingness to hear input from the production team for the film’s marketing and release plan. “They put the film into almost 3,000 theaters. Imagine that! I mean, two years ago, you could not have imagined any independent movie like this ever getting a release like that.”

Sanger hopes “Cabrini” is reflective of the stories audiences want to see these days. “We all wondered whether theatrical would ever come back. And maybe the way it comes back is with really good stories, and not just big blockbuster action films. So that’s the hope for people like me who want to make these kinds of movies. I’m very thrilled that Angel has really put their pedal to the metal and done what they’ve said they were going to do.”