Father Stu

Father Stuart Long (1963-2014)

By now, you’ve heard about Stuart Long and his big Hollywood debut. Long was the Montana boxer and ne’er-do-well who became a Catholic and then, against all odds, a priest. Father Stu had a rich and fruitful ministry, despite contracting a rare debilitating condition—inclusion body myositis—that cut his life short at age 50.

The biopic came about after actor Mark Wahlberg determined that Long’s remarkable story should be better known. Father Stu, starring Wahlberg in the title role, opened in theaters during Holy Week. Whatever its merits, the film caused a stir among the Catholic faithful—not least due to its R rating and strong language.

Yet criticism of the screenplay’s coarse dialogue should not detract from the film’s focus: Father Stu himself. Long’s clinging to Christ amid intense suffering is an edifying lesson in love.

Love, wrote Pope St. John Paul II, is “the answer to the question of the meaning of suffering,” and this “answer has been given by God to man in the cross of Jesus Christ.”

Father Stu lived this answer in his broken body throughout his brief pastoral career, but he had been tutored in its reality well before he got to seminary.

Long’s 1994 baptism and reception into the Church, for example, were prompted in part by a motorcycle accident that almost killed him. Following his conversion, Long taught at a Catholic high school and then headed to New York City in 1997 to spend time with the Franciscan Friars of the Renewal—to encounter the poor and learn to serve them as ambassadors of the King.

While in New York, Long got to know the order’s founder, Father Benedict Groeschel, CFR—a psychologist deeply interested in how humans cope with tragedy, pain, and loss.

“To boast in the Cross,” wrote Father Groeschel, “is an almost fierce gesture when we confront all that would defeat us.”

Such is the kind of talk Stuart Long himself adopted as he grew in faith, and he accelerated his appropriation of this new way of speaking after the friars sent him to prep for seminary at Franciscan University of Steubenville.

In 2003, Long entered Oregon’s Mount Angel Seminary as an ordination candidate for the Diocese of Helena. While enrolled there, Long fell ill, and his disabling diagnosis was identified. Still, Bishop George Thomas of Helena decided to proceed with the ordination.

“I kept being prompted by the Holy Spirit,” Thomas said in an interview. “In my estimation, there’s a lot of power in redemptive suffering, and that’s exactly how he lived.”

It’s how he lived, and it’s how he embodied the language of God’s love through embracing profound suffering.

“That cross of his disease was the most powerful way to serve people,” said Father Bart Tolleson, who had been ordained with Father Stu and knew him well. “He was tireless in his service and … fearless even though he was limited.”

That says it all.