I probably owe my presence on the There Be Dragons set to the famous Jesuit priest Fr. Daniel Berrigan. Now in his 90th year, he is a poet and peace activist who, back in the late 60s and early 70s, spent a short time on the FBI’s Most Wanted list and a somewhat longer time in prison for destroying draft files during the Vietnam War.

When Roland Joffé directed The Mission, which dealt with Jesuit missionaries in 18th-century Latin America, he asked Daniel Berrigan to work as a consultant on the set. I recall having heard about Fr. Berrigan’s work on The Mission, but I didn’t know the whole story until Roland told it to me. In fact, for The Mission, Roland had not one but two Jesuits on hand as consultants. The two were, in Roland’s words, “a very, very right-wing Jesuit — those things do exist — and a left-wing Jesuit, Father Daniel Berrigan.” What’s more, Fr. Berrigan is in the film: he actually plays one of the Jesuits (in the photo above, he’s seen with Jeremy Irons).

The experience was a great success, and Roland Joffé decided, in effect, to repeat it for There Be Dragons, because one of the main characters in There Be Dragons is a Catholic priest and the founder of Opus Dei. That’s where I, as a priest of Opus Dei, came in. I was, as Roland put it, to “serve the same purpose as Daniel Berrigan.” The Latin American shooting location would be similar, but this time it would be Opus Dei instead of the Jesuits. And I wasn’t going to do any acting.

I’ve never asked Roland why he didn’t get another priest to, so to speak, balance me out, as he did in The Mission. I’d like to think that I’m just a perfectly middle-of-the-road guy, but perhaps, having worked (before I was a priest) as a speechwriter for a Republican attorney general and for a Democrat governor, I was sufficiently schizophrenic to give Roland both sides in one.

In any case, thank you, Fr. Berrigan, for creating such an attractive precedent.