Neumann Inspires

This is a long one! In 1955, Eustace was 23 years old, and he was looking for a mass to go to before he started work. He was walking down the street and he saw a church and it was Saint Donato’s Parish in Philadelphia. He walks in and out of the corner of his eye he sees this statue. He has no clue who the statue is or the impact that woman is going to have on his life. He goes in the mass and the priest says, “I'm going to do a nine-week novena on Mother Cabrini’s life,” and he said, “Well, this is interesting, I think I'll sit through this.” He sat through the nine weeks of the novena and said, “Wow, this is a make-it-happen lady and I want to make things happen in my life, so I'm going to adopt her as my patron saint.” Fast forward 60 years he became very, very successful in business and a nun had walked into his office and said, “Eustace, I want you to help me do a movie on Mother Cabrini.” Now she came to him because he had done a movie before called Bella, a small budget production, but he thought “I'm never getting into another movie again! It's a ton of work and I just don't want to do it.” So he said no, and she bugged him for six years to do this movie, her name was Sister Mary Louise Sullivan, she was the president of Cabrini University and a Cabrini nun. So finally, after the 6th year, she did find somebody to do it, it was an Italian production company and they were going to put up their own money to do it and she said, “Eustace, I want you to come hear what they want to do for the movie.” So, he thought, fantastic, this is great, I'll definitely go up. So they have the meeting and they pitched him on what they were going to do, and they were going to make this fairy tale movie of a saint handing out candy and patting kids on the head and he said, “Absolutely not, you cannot do that to Mother Cabrini. Sister, she was a make-it-happen lady, a humanitarian, a charitable woman. You can't do this to Cabrini.” And she said, “OK, then you got to do the movie.” He said, “OK, I'll do it under two conditions: one that we do a movie about a woman that happens to be a nun; she was a great entrepreneur, a humanitarian, and she happened to be a nun.” He wanted to make it a universal movie for everybody, Muslims, Hindus, Catholics, non-religious, a universal movie for everybody. And the second thing he said is, “Sister, I’ll do it, but I wanna do it as a charity. She was all about charity, so I wanna form a 501C3 where all the proceeds will go to charity.” And she said, “Okay,” so that was the beginning of the movie. And then he went out and he hired a screenwriter and read 26 books on her life, walked her footsteps in America, went to her convent in Guidonia, Italy, spent 10 days with the historians…And that's how the movie got started.