Celebrity news coverage and religion couldn’t be more polar opposites most of the time. Coverage of actors, models and others in the entertainment industry often resembles a list for the seven deadly sins.
Every so often, the world of celebrity and faith intersect. When they do, the mainstream press doesn’t know what to do with it, creating tone-deaf coverage similar to sports stories containing what GetReligion has long called religion “ghosts.”
Meanwhile, the religious press — I’m referring to Catholic media in this case — love to jump on this kind of story. This has certainly been the case with actor Shia LaBeouf this summer and public statements regarding his conversion to Catholicism.
It’s a textbook case of the mainstream press largely ignoring such an announcement, while the Catholic press can’t get enough of it. When the mainstream press did cover LaBeouf’s interview, it was in the context of his troubled personal life. For some journalists in the Catholic press, he became a poster child for upholding tradition and the Latin Mass against the more progressive forces in the church.
Depending on who and what you read, LeBeouf’s conversion story is either a farce, something to be celebrated or something to be feared.
LaBeouf, like many in his profession, does interviews primarily to promote specific movies and their careers overall. While promoting his new film “Padre Pio,” which premiered at the Venice International Film Festival, LaBeouf announced that he had converted to Catholicism. The movie is based on the life of Padre Pio, an Italian Franciscan Capuchin friar famous for exhibiting stigmata most of his life. He was canonized as a saint by Pope John Paul II in 2002.
The former “Transformers” star made it known that he was now a practicing Catholic during an Aug. 25 appearance on Bishop Robert Barron’s show “Conversations at the Crossroads.” The YouTube link alone has generated over 1.3 million views.
Here is where the celebrity news coverage got interesting.
