"The Nativity Story"
Due out this Christmas... of course.

The Passion smacked me right between the eyes. I needed to be reminded of the sufferings Christ went through for all of us. Due out in a few short months will be The Nativity Story, starring 15 year old Keisha Castle-Hughes as the Holy Mother of God.

The Passion helped me to better understand what Christ must have really went through. Hopefully, The Nativity Story will also better help me understand what The Holy Mother and St. Joseph really went through. I'm looking forward to it.

This from co-producer Marty Bowen, a Catholic raised in Texas;

Growing up, he said, he always put Mary "up on a pedestal."

"The Nativity Story" is trying to make Mary real, Bowen said, adding that he hoped that the movie would help people see "Mary was a girl before she became a woman and a woman before she became the mother of God."

He said people should also feel empathy for Joseph, a man "who finds the woman he wants to spend the rest of his life with," then discovers she is pregnant and he is not the father of the child.

"Talk about a crisis of faith of staggering proportions," Bowen said.

Bowen, who wears around his neck a rosary his grandmother brought him from Rome and a medal of St. Christopher his mother gave him, said the story of Mary, Joseph, and the shepherds they meet is "a journey of faith that's rewarded" by God. But people also "need to understand how they earned that" divine reward, he said.

Those are exactly some of the reasons as to why we love The Holy Mother and St. Joseph. This is no great mystery. One doesn't have to be a St Augustine or a St Thomas Aquinas to figure this one out. We Catholics have known this for almost 2,000 years. Hopefully, this film might help bring some of our non-Catholic friends around, through the power of The Holy Ghost, of course.