” Padre Pio saved my life… In a video broadcast live on Youtube, actor Shia LaBeouf testified to his conversion to Catholicism. Invited by Bishop Barron, Bishop of Winora-Rochester, the 36-year-old actor testified to his faith in front of the 540,000 subscribers to the Youtube channel of this American bishop. This discussion of almost an hour and a half touched on many subjects such as prayer, forgiveness, his acting, monastic orders or even the Latin mass.
Born in 1986 to an Ashkenazi Jewish mother and a Pentecostal father, Shia LaBeouf began his acting career when he was ten years old. It is especially revealed in 2007 with the first opus of transformers which makes him one of the hottest actors in Hollywood. Thereafter, he chained successful films but turned more and more towards complex and tortured roles. In 2014, he who considered himself an atheist, shot in the war film Fury. He plays a particularly religious American soldier. ” I became a Christian, not in a fake and hypocritical way, but in a very real way he said at the time. Yet his path was just beginning.
Two years ago, during a ” spiritual program on Zoom, he met Abel Ferrara, director and screenwriter. The latter then plans to shoot a film about the life of Padre Pio. He sees in Shia LaBeouf the ideal interpreter. The latter accepts, it is then the first film he undertakes after a two-year break.
“Shut up and go to that chapel”
In order to best prepare to play the Italian saint, the actor retired for a time to a monastery of Capuchin friars. There, he wished to be able to discover the monastic life but also to study the character of Padre Pio. The actor confesses that at this time, he was living one of the darkest passages of his life: “I didn’t want to be alive when all this happened… I felt ashamed like it had never happened to me. I didn’t know where to go… »
Indeed, to say that Shia Labeouf dragged pans is an understatement. Accusations of sexual touching, drugs, violence, plagiarism, … Everything goes for this successful actor who seems in many respects to have burned his wings. However, in the intimacy and retreat of this Capuchin monastery, he discovers a new dimension that will overwhelm him.
” Until I entered this monastery, I had never truly known silence and tranquility.he confided to Bishop Barron… I was constantly restless, my phone carrying the hubbub of my social life to the most remote places. And there, a brother said to me “shut up and go to this chapel. I found myself face to face with the Blessed Sacrament and I first learned to be silent within myself. » He, the fisherman, accustomed to all the excesses of show business, feels touched by the charity of the Capuchin friars: “Seeing other people who had sinned beyond anything I could ever imagine being also forgiven gave me hope! »
” Trap by God
“It stopped being just preparation for a movie. It started to be something much bigger than all that! Shia LaBeouf also tells Robert Barron how he felt. trapped but in a good way by God. According to him, He used his ego to drive him away from all the vices of his old worldly life and bring him back to Himself.
” Now I experience prayer and the Rosary… I begin to know the Mass, to live it fully and to feel its effects, enthuses the actor in this video already viewed more than 250,000 times... I do not yet receive the host, because I have not been baptized but I feel this deep desire! It is Bishop Barron who concludes this rich discussion: My feeling is that it was Padre Pio, from up there, who guided you to him! The fact that you play his part and that you meet Jesus thanks to that, it is his intervention… So thank God for all that! »