When I first met Dwight Longenecker in 1999 I already thought his life story was unique.

The setting was an international journalism conference in Chichester, England. Longenecker was working in journalism at the time, after studying theology at Oxford University. He had already been ordained as an Anglican priest, but then saw the writing on the ancient church walls and swam the Tiber to Roman Catholicism.

But here’s the biographical detail that grabbed me. I was fascinated that, after growing up evangelical in Pennsylvania, he had done his undergraduate work at Bob Jones University in Greenville, S.C. — America’s famous campus that proudly embraces the loaded term “fundamentalist.”

From BJU to England and on to Rome! What a journey, I thought. And people said my pilgrimage from Southern Baptist preacher’s kid to Eastern Orthodoxy was unusual.

But there was one more remarkable shoe to drop in the Longenecker story. In 2006 he returned to America with his wife and four children and — taking the Pastoral Provision door opened by Pope John Paul II (now a saint) — Longenecker was ordained as a Catholic priest.

So where is he now? He is the pastor of Our Lady of the Rosary Catholic Church in — wait for it — Greenville, S.C., a few miles from his old BJU stomping grounds. So the Catholic priest who is “in charge” of Bob Jones territory (long ago, the founder called Catholicism a “Satanic cult”) is a BJU graduate.

Now, I offered all of that as an intro to our think piece for this Easter Sunday (for Western churches). It’s a blog post by Longenecker entitled “The Passion of the Christ, me and Mel Gibson” that includes a fascinating detail about what many consider the most beautiful image in that controversial movie (click here for his “Standing on my head” website).

The key: Longenecker, as a journalist, did quite a bit of writing about film. Thus, he ended up in one of those famous advance screenings with Gibson — who showed a rough edit to a variety of religious audiences while raising money to independently release the film. After showing this early version of his movie, Gibson came out to take questions from the small crowd. Then this happened: