A Main Line patriarch raised $50 million to make ‘Cabrini,’ the new movie about a relentless Italian American nun

J. Eustace Wolfington didn’t want to fund another movie. Not even when a persuasive nun, Sister Mary Louise Sullivan, former head of Cabrini College in Radnor, came to his King of Prussia office in 2011 and asked for millions for a film about his favorite saint, the forceful Italian American immigrant advocate and shelter, hospital, and school builder Francesca Saverio (Frances Xavier) Cabrini.

He reversed course when he learned what the community of sisters that Cabrini founded had in mind — what he described as a pious but bland version of Cabrini’s bold, dramatic life, in which she challenged violent public prejudice and church and civil authorities to help despised immigrants in New York and Chicago.

The story he backed, Cabrini, opened a weekend ago in King of Prussia, with four generations of Wolfington’s family in attendance. A second premiere was held in Los Angeles. The movie is to open widely on Friday.

“They wanted to make her a fairy tale,” Wolfington said, shaking his head in a theater seat at the Regal UA multiplex ahead of the red-carpet premiere. Hundreds of guests, including the movie’s directors and several lead actors, were also there.

“I had to make a better movie — to capture who she was, a woman who didn’t take ‘no’ for an answer, not from the pope, not from her archbishop, not from the mayor of New York or the head of the Senate in Italy,” he said.

He argued to do a movie like Gandhi about “this very strong woman who happened to be a nun.” Cabrini, who died in 1917, was canonized the first Italian American saint in 1946.

“You don’t need to show all the preaching and praying, because her life is the sermon,” he said.

Wolfington said he had admired Cabrini since 1955, when he stopped by her shrine at St. Donato Roman Catholic Church in West Philadelphia along the route of his commute to his father’s Chrysler Plymouth dealership. He saw her as “an entrepreneur — what I aspired to be.”

Wolfington became the patriarch of a large family that has made fortunes in the automotive business. After selling his national leasing company, Half-a-Car, in 2000, he named his family investment firm Cabrini Asset Management Inc.

He had sworn off risking scarce capital and reputation on the chancy movie business after he helped his nephew Sean Wolfington produce Bella, the feature debut by Mexican director Alejandro G. Monteverde, released in 2006. That film won awards and repaid its modest budget but failed to reach a mass audience.

The Cabrini project changed his mind.

In 2017, he recruited Monteverde and his writing partner Rod Barr, who together made Sound of Freedom, a controversial sleeper hit that grossed a reported $250 million worldwide after it was placed on more than 1,000 screens by Utah-based Angel Studios. The company has a reputation for using social media and church networks to reach audiences immune to mainstream Hollywood hype.

“Eustace put together this whole team,” Monteverde told the audience at the King of Prussia premiere. “Our last movie [Bella] was a forgotten, orphan film. But I think Mother Cabrini used that movie to introduce us” to Wolfington and his community of financiers and support people.

“He said we had to shine a light on Mother Cabrini, who shone a light to the world,” Monteverde said

Angel Studios also agreed to distribute Cabrini — lining up 2,600 screens for its national rollout on Friday, according to Angel.

“We talked to all the majors — Universal, Disney, Apple, Amazon,” Wolfington said. “Everyone loves this movie. But I didn’t feel they knew how to market it. Angel knows.”

“It’s been a wild journey,” Angel cofounder Jordan Harmon said at the premiere. He compared Monteverde to Frank Capra, Italian American director of It’s a Wonderful Life and other mid-20th century movies that exemplify familiar virtues.

Wolfington lined up $50 million from investors and lenders to make the movie, which portrays Cabrini, played by Naples-born actress Christiana Dell’Anna, in relentless conflict with civil and church leaders in the United States and Italy.

Her diminutive but tough band of sisters fights to build lifesaving, community-building institutions amid a rain of anti-immigrant insults, arsons, intracommunity violence, and official obstruction, before winning more widespread support and recognition.

Near the end, the movie suggests that Cabrini successfully marshaled growing Italian American political clout to win elected officials’ support after initial opposition.

Actors playing the powerful male obstructionists include Federic Castelluccio, who played Furio in The Sopranos, as the senator who eventually funds Cabrini’s hospital; 1970s heartthrob Giancarlo Giannini as a wise though patronizing Pope Leo XIII; Philadelphia’s own David Morse as the very political Archbishop Michael Corrigan of New York; and John Lithgow as a fictional, racist, deeply corrupt New York mayor.

The movie was produced under a nonprofit charity, Lodigiano Film Development Inc., named for Cabrini’s hometown in northern Italy. Any revenues above costs is to go to charities backed by the investors, including Cabrini’s Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, in 17 countries.

Wolfington said the movie met its backers’ goals: “You want people to walk in upset about the broken world and to walk out on fire, wanting to change things.”