{"id":280,"date":"2009-02-18T14:00:52","date_gmt":"2009-02-18T14:00:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/pontifications\/2009\/02\/mickey-rourke.html"},"modified":"2009-02-18T14:00:52","modified_gmt":"2009-02-18T14:00:52","slug":"mickey-rourke","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/2009\/02\/mickey-rourke.html","title":{"rendered":"Mickey Rourke’s guardian angel"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Mickey<\/span>Lord knows the troubled actor needs one, and in one of the least-covered pre-Oscar stories you’ll see in the runup to the Sunday night movie awards, Rourke tells Our Sunday Visitor<\/a> about the New York priest who helped turn him around in 1994.
\nRourke is up for a Best Actor for his role as Randy “Ram” Robinson, the over-the-hill wrestler in “The Wrestler,” <\/a>and if he wins it’ll be a tale of redemption twice over.
\nThe OSV piece is available to subscribers only (so subscribe–it’s a good cause, too!) but in essence it recounts how the bad boy 80’s star (and yes, I saw “Diner”<\/a> when it came out–loved it–and how about that cast?) was at rock bottom and about to sink lower. His wife at the time was hooked on heroin and then was raped, and when Rourke learned who the rapist was, he headed out with a gun kill the man and then himself. As the OSV story tells it:
\n<\/p>\n

Yet, instead of going through with it, Rourke felt compelled to enter the Church of the Holy Cross near Times Square. There, racked with sorrow and doubt, he started to cry, and the parish pastor, Father Peter Colapietro, took notice.
\n“I reached a place in my life where living was living hard. I was at a crossroads. Because I was raised Catholic, I had issues with the dark side of life I was drifting in,” Rourke said. “I didn’t know this man, Father Peter. I just walked in his church one day, walked in the right door and met the right priest.”
\nFather Colapietro managed to talk Rourke out of his plan. “He took away my gun and had me leave the note with St. Jude, the patron saint of impossible causes. And he said that part of my life could be over now and I still had the opportunity to do things over again.”
\nOver the 14 years since, Rourke and Father Colapietro have cemented their friendship, with Rourke saying his confessions in Colapietro’s kitchen. Rourke has Thanksgiving and Christmas dinner at the church rectory.
\n“He definitely is a man of faith and believes in God’s presence in the world,” Father Colapietro told OSV. “He often wonders why he’s having this success right now, and I say you’ve got the talent, and talent is a gift from God.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

<\/strong>
\nIn the piece, Rourke also speaks movingly about his difficult childhood and Catholic upbringing.
\n<\/p>\n

“I grew up going to catechism classes, and the early part of my life was in the Catholic Church. My father was very devout. He left us when I was 6, but I looked forward to Sundays as the days I got to see my dad,” he said. “I loved going to church with him, and we had our ritual where, after church, we’d get a bag of doughnuts, a quart of milk and sit on a stoop. You know, it’s like you see somebody you know and respect, my father on his knees praying, I wanted to be just like him.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

<\/strong>
\nRourke still has his rough edges, but it’s a good story. I hope he wins just to hear the acceptance speech from a guy who fell so far so fast he was nearly homeless.
\nFor another side of the story, read this 1996 New York Times profile of Father Pete<\/a>. And pray for vocations!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Lord knows the troubled actor needs one, and in one of the least-covered pre-Oscar stories you’ll see in the runup to the Sunday night movie awards, Rourke tells Our Sunday Visitor about the New York priest who helped turn him around in 1994. Rourke is up for a Best Actor for his role as Randy…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":128,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,6,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-280","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-catholic","category-church","category-pop-culture"],"yoast_head":"\nMickey Rourke's guardian angel - Pontifications<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/2009\/02\/mickey-rourke.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Mickey Rourke's guardian angel - Pontifications\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Lord knows the troubled actor needs one, and in one of the least-covered pre-Oscar stories you’ll see in the runup to the Sunday night movie awards, Rourke tells Our Sunday Visitor about the New York priest who helped turn him around in 1994. 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He came by all those vocations by accident, or Providence, during a longer-than-expected sojourn in Rome in the 1980s. Gibson began his journalistic career as a walk-on sports editor and columnist at The International Courier, a small daily in Rome serving Italy's English-language community. He then found a job as a newscaster and writer across the Tiber at the English Programme at Vatican Radio, an entity he describes as a cross between NPR and Armed Forces Radio for the pope. The Jesuits who ran the radio were charitable enough to hire Gibson even though he had no radio background, could not pronounce the name \"Karol Wojtyla,\" and wasn't Catholic. Time and experience overcame all those challenges, and Gibson went on to cover dozens of John Paul II's overseas trips, including papal visits to Africa, Europe, Latin America and the United States. When Gibson returned to the United States in 1990 he returned to print journalism to cover the religion beat in his native New Jersey for two dailies. He worked first for The Record of Hackensack, and then for The Star-Ledger of New Jersey, winning the nation's top awards in religion writing at both places. In 1999 he won the Supple Religion Writer of the Year contest, and in 2000 he was chosen as the Templeton Religion Reporter of the Year. Gibson is a longtime board member of the Religion Newswriters Association and he is a contributor to ReligionLink, a service of the Religion Newswriters Foundation. Since 2003, David Gibson has been an independent writer specializing in Catholicism, religion in contemporary America, and early Christian history. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Fortune, Boston Magazine, Commonweal, America, The New York Observer, Beliefnet and Religion News Service. He has produced documentaries on early Christianity for CNN and other networks and has traveled on assignment to dozens of countries, with an emphasis on reporting from Europe and the Middle East. He is a frequent television commentator and has appeared on the major cable and broadcast networks. He is also a regular speaker at conferences and seminars on Catholicism, religion in America, and journalism. Gibson's first book, The Coming Catholic Church: How the Faithful are Shaping a New American Catholicism (HarperSanFrancisco), was published in 2003 and deals with the church-wide crisis revealed by the clergy sexual abuse crisis. The book was widely hailed as a \"powerful\" and \"first-rate\" treatment of the crisis from \"an academically informed journalist of the highest caliber.\" His second book, The Rule of Benedict: Pope Benedict XVI and His Battle with the Modern World (HarperSanFrancisco), came out in 2006 and is the first full-scale treatment of the Ratzinger papacy--how it happened, who he is, and what it means for the Catholic Church. The Rule of Benedict has been praised as \"an exceptionally interesting and illuminating book\" from \"a master storyeller.\" Born and raised in New Jersey, David Gibson studied European history at Furman University in South Carolina and spent a year working on Capitol Hill before moving to Italy. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and daughter and is working on a book about conversion, and on several film and television projects.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/author\/dgibson"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/280","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/128"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=280"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/280\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=280"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=280"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=280"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}