The options presented in the title are so stark: God or The Girl. The once-shown five-part series on Arts & Entertainment cable channel is now being marketed as a DVD and can be a tool for young Catholic men to use to weigh the weighty matter of pursuing a career as a priest or rather go for marriage and family.It is billed as a real-life look at four impressive young men trying to decide whether to answer Gods call. The Christian Newswire says it faithfully portrays the reality of the issue of whether to answer a call to religious service or the churchs command to find a mate for life and multiply. God or The Girl powerfully captures the tension, terror and triumph Joe, Steve, Mike and Dan face at the most important crossroads of their lives, it notes. A Boston Herald writer observes, Watching these men wrestle with this life-changing decision should be required viewing for critics of the church as well as the faithful.
The double-DVD, featuring 225 minutes of drama, is described as a feature showing the ultimate struggle between the choice of two goods. It asks such questions as What drives a man to become a priest? How does he initiate the process, and where does it end? What would he give up by becoming a priest? What would he be giving up by not becoming one? Each of the four young men comes at it with different issues, relationships, torment and aspirations as tensions build in the final weeks before they must make their choices.
Theres Dan, 21, a fearless and passionate Catholic who lives with nine celibate young men in a house called Fort Zion but is conflicted by whether he has the starch to be a priest, not to mention an on-again, off-again relationship with a girl. Another is Mike, 24, who deeply admired his parish priest growing up and who has a deepening relationship with a young woman and feels deep pressure to decide. Steve, 25, abruptly abandoned an $80,000 consultants job to be a campus minister at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, but he is fearful of how much sacrifice would be entailed in the priesthood and is tempted to return to he consultant world. Finally, the oldest, Joe, 28, who is an Ohio campus counselor with two tryouts at seminary life and steels himself to possibly go back for a third time and make it work. He recognizes he has spent 10 years vacillating, with failed love relationships and continual family pressure to be a priest.
In a review of the series in April, Washington Post writer John Maynard lauds A&E for its care and choosing higher ground with the sensitive subject. He notes that Fox or VH1 would have created different kinds of messes with it. Maynard tells how the Dan character of Fort Zion carries an 80-pound, self-made cross on his back for 20 miles to try to replicate some of the pain that Christ endured, and he leads protest rallies outside of an abortion clinic and strip club. And Maynard believes Dan would be awarded any gold metal for Extreme Catholicism for his spirit. He seems to have the least angst about deciding between religion and redheads, Maynard notes.
With the diminishing number of men going to seminary to replenish the Roman Catholic Churchs priest ranks, it appears that vocations is in crisis. A growing number of parishes have no priests and seminaries cannot keep up. I regret I missed the A&E series when it aired last April. I suspect it will be reshown. In any event, it can be ordered at www.godorthegirl.com, where more about the compelling series can be found.
Thankfully, it appears that in the past few years the tide is turning - more men are answering the Call to the priesthood.
We’ll see, of course, if this is just a momentary blip or a real trend upwards, but the signs - even those that are merely anecdotal - are promising.