The Other Fr Steven Beatty Project

The best movie poster I’ve ever seen was for the first Star Wars prequel, The Phantom Menace . It was very simple. You saw this little boy standing against a beige Tatooine desert background. His shadow fell on a wall behind him... and that shadow was in the unmistakable, chilling shape of Vader. That was the most compelling thing about the prequel story. We met this bright, innocent little kid who loved his Mom and was a mechanical whiz… how did he become Vader? How could any little boy become Vader? How did Anakin go so wrong? The next three movies answered that question. (Never mind that they also left most of us wondering “how did George Lucas go so wrong?”)

Her parents named her Agnes when she was born in 1910… her full name in Albanian, Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu. [something like "Ahnyes Gonja Bo-yeah-jee-oo"]. Without getting too deep into a history lesson, I don’t think it’s an accident that God raised up a great Saint from this place and time. She was born a subject of the Ottoman Empire, which fell when she was a girl, and after she left Albania would become Communist. Her homeland would have the sad distinction of proclaiming itself the world’s first officially Atheist state.