Classic films about saints, like “The Song of Bernadette” and “A Man for All Seasons” and more recent releases like Abel Ferrara’s “Padre Pio” and Alejandro Monteverde’s “Cabrini,” take their cues from traditional hagiographies, bringing grandiose renderings of the lives of these holy men and women to the screen.

“Cabrini,” for instance, produced by Angel Studios follows the traditional model of hagiography, placing Francesca Cabrini’s heroic feats front and center in order to inspire viewers to emulate her laudable example. John Anderson’s glowing review of the film for America described Cabrini, “Portrayed by a gauntly radiant Cristiana Dell’Anna,” as one practiced in “speaking truth to power and doing so relentlessly.” The religious sister journeys to New York at the time of “an explosion circa 1887 of Italian immigration, prejudice and poverty [that] was creating a particular kind of hell for their exported countrymen.”

Against immense challenges, Cabrini and her order, the Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, go on to found missions, orphanages, and hospitals in New York, and as the film’s coda tells us, around the country and eventually around the world.

Yet new trends among more recent accounts of the saints have been changing the narrative, focusing on oft-ignored and more mundane aspects of their personal lives. Two new films on the lives of Mother Seton and Mother Cabrini, produced by the New Jersey based couple MaryLou and Jerome Bongiorno and released on PBS over the past week and a half, are placing the spotlight on lesser-emphasized aspects of these holy women’s lives.

Known best for their documentaries on matters of socioeconomic and racial justice and Catholic education in Newark, NJ, the Bongiornos decided to venture into telling the stories of these two women who, they state, have deeply inspired them spiritually and professionally.

Narrated in the first-person and weaving together a creative mix of photos, painting and drawings, the documentaries’ scripts draw upon writings by and about the two saints, as well as other historical documents. The films provide a comprehensive view of their lives, including details about their childhoods, their entry into religious life, the founding of their respective missions and the conflicts they confronted, and – perhaps what is most compelling – bits of streams of consciousness style, introspective reflections on their work and their relationship with God. The Bongiornos combine their extensive research with their artistic and spiritual creativity in these moments, reflecting the ways that these saints spoke to them and may also speak to us.

Such accounts of the lives of the saints remind me that even people like me – can become saints. We often forget that the measure of sanctity does not lie in our capacity for perfection or moral coherence. Rather, it resides in the sincerity with which we offer our full selves – including our strengths and weaknesses, our likes and dislikes – to God for him to use for his glory.
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