As Kris said to me last night, “Who would ever have thought that this [your] face would end up in People magazine?” Of course, I’m stretching the truth — you won’t see my face in People, but you just might see a quotation.
They are doing a story on Mary and The Nativity Story, and they gave me a call. Of course, the magazine eluded me. When my publicist told me that People wanted to talk to me, my mind wandered not to People but to Newsweek. So, after talking to the newswriter and sitting down at lunch with my student (Ben Wickstrom), I said “People” and then thought, “Good grief, that’s at the grocery store.”

The editor, Kathy Dowd, and I chatted for about 15 minutes — I standing in a very light drizzle. We wandered through Mary and the movie and then Keisha Castle-Hughes, and the big issue: Her not being invited to the Vatican for the International Premiere. Now, I’ll say this again: the rumor is that it had to do with her pregnancy. I don’t know if this is true. Now see this — the publicist says she is missing premieres because of working on another film.
The gist of my comment: This is a delicious irony — Mary’s actress being in the same social situation as Mary herself, and I hope the Church (all of us, and I’m not thinking here of the Vatican) will respond to Keisha in ways unlike the way Mary’s culture responded to her. (And The Nativity Story makes a big deal of how poorly she was treated.) And I believe in Mary’s virginal conception.
How do we treat with compassion those who have “broken the rules”?