Bishop Robert Barron confirms actor Shia LaBeouf

The piece below is from the Tablet weekly online update. It is written by staff reporter Patrick Hudson.

It’s an interesting story and difficult what to make of it.

Dear Reader,

Bishop Robert Barron of Winona-Rochester confirmed the idiosyncratic actor Shia LaBeouf on New Year’s Eve, at a Capuchin church in California. 

Catholic reportage intersected – as it quite often does – with Hollywood gossip when the friar who sponsored LaBeouf said he had mooted becoming a deacon one day. 

Back in the noughties I enjoyed repeats of his curious sit-com Even Stevens on after-school telly and loathed, with all right-thinking people, Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull in 2008, but hadn’t come across him in much else since (except in a slightly-viral song about him being an “actual cannibal” – LaBeouf gamely made a cameo in the music video). 

Then he starred as the eponymous stigmatic in last year’s Padre Pio and broadcast an 80-minute interview with Bishop Barron about how the part led him to a love of the faith. Perhaps that’s the kind of handbrake turn that does lead to Holy Orders.

The Capuchins are delighted for him. LaBeouf reportedly spent a lot of time with them in preparation for filming Pio and found solace in the “nuts and bolts” of the faith; it seems the friars took a sensibly dynamic approach towards catechesis, not strictly by the RCIA book. Celebrities who love the old rite make anodyne online copy, but there’s a good and troubling story behind this Tinseltown-clerical gloss – because LaBeouf came to the Church after a period of career drift, bouts of alcoholism and violence, and domestic abuse allegations. 

A lawsuit filed against him by a former girlfriend in 2020 makes gruelling, disgusting reading, and is due to go to trial in October this year. LaBeouf indirectly acknowledged the claims in 2022 and accepted that he “****ed up bad”, that he was “a pleasure-seeking, selfish, self-centred, dishonest, inconsiderate, fearful human being”.

The truth that the Church accepts anybody, however uncomfortable we might be with them, is not something we should be comfortable with. It is not a truism, but part of the radical difficulty of Christianity. 

Reports of a potential film-star deacon which nod discreetly to a “scandalous” past are as callous as any

Variety profile, because LaBeouf is another broken person received into the Church as likely to embarrass as to exalt it. 

Catholics have another troubled and troubling individual on the books and that – much more than a celebrity convert, and however awkward it turns out to be – is good news.