RUSH: I have to tell you about a movie that opens today. I saw some of it last night. I got started late and I had to go to bed. Yes, yes, as powerful, influential member of the media, I have a screener. And they captioned it for me, but they captioned it in Spanish. So… (laughing) It’s this Andy Garcia movie. They’re sponsoring it here on the program. It is excellent. It’s For Greater Glory. It’s about religious freedom in Mexico, set 1917. And it’s an attack on the Catholic Church.

Catholics are mowed down, gunned down in church. Senor Calles runs the country back then and says, “For the greater good, for freedom, we’ve got to wipe out all the religious people.” It’ll infuriate you, but it’s Andy Garcia’s movie. It’s a great movie. There’s even a story about him this week. (I forget where, maybe USA Today.) It’s such a departure for a major Hollywood star to take on a role that promotes Christianity, that does not impugn it, laugh at it, make fun of it. It promotes it.

And there are parallels to the attack on the Catholic Church today, to this movie. It’s pronounced. It’s called For Greater Glory, and it opens today. Now, Andy Garcia has been in a lot of things. He was in Ocean’s Eleven. He is the owner of the Bellagio in Ocean’s Eleven. I’ve seen him a bunch of times at the AT&T Pro-Am. I’ve never met him but I’ve said hi when walking past each other on the golf course. But this is set in Mexico 1917. It’s Catholics who die. They’re gunned down. They’re stabbed.

It’s not too gory but it’s still explicit enough, and these devout Catholics are fighting a leader of the country who has issued a mandate. The first thing in the movie is he issues a mandate to take from them their religious freedom and to destroy the church. It’s his ticket to total control over the country, is to take away Catholic religious freedom, and he sends his military people into the churches. There’s no slowness to this thing. It gets right to it.

I’m gonna finish it tonight. They were so nice to caption this for me. They even sent me two DVDs. I said, “Well, maybe they sent a Spanish caption, too.” So I put the first one in, Spanish captions. I said, “Well, no big deal; I’ll just put the other disc in.” I put the other disc in, and it, too, was captioned in Spanish. (interruption) No, no, no, I haven’t gotten The Avengers. No, this is the most recent screener that I’ve got.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: I don’t want to give away this movie, For Greater Glory. I don’t have much of it left to finish. It was tough because the closed-captioning was in Spanish, and I was rewinding at times to hear some of the dialogue because it’s important. But basically this movie (it’s the Andy Garcia movie) is the story of Mexico in 1917 through the ’20s. The president is Plutarco Calles in the ’20s.

The president ordered every Catholic Church shut down, he made Mass illegal, and he set out on a campaign to murder priests. And the movie is about three different freedom fighters. One of the freedom fighters is Andy Garcia, but he doesn’t start out that way. Andy Garcia shows up early in the movie, and he’s unattached to the whole thing. He’s looking at it from a bit of a distance. He then tries to make some money off of all this.

And in that process he gets caught up in the movement. He becomes a strident opponent of religious persecution. But it’s eerie. The people that produced the movie and made it could not possibly have known at the time that they started this project that when their movie came out there would be a parallel to the Obama administration’s war on the Catholic Church in America in 2012. Now, don’t anybody misunderstand here. What happened in Mexico is not what’s happening here in terms of the violence.

But the effort to run roughshod over religious freedom as a part of Obamacare is a close parallel. And for that reason the movie has a connection. Even if there was no connection, it’s still a moving flick, and it is about what people do. It’s about the honor and character, the devotion to beliefs of people who are committed to their God. It’s as moving as it could be, and it’s so unexpected. When’s the last movie you saw, a mainstream Hollywood movie, that was pro-Catholic or pro-Christianity?

Or a movie that did not talk about priests or abuse of altar boys? When was the last time you saw anything like that reflected in the mainstream entertainment press or movies about religion, Christianity. Passion of the Christ is about it, right? And look at that. (chuckling) That’s my point. It’s my point. In the story I read yesterday about Andy Garcia and his role in the movie, he was asked, “Are you afraid what this role might do to the rest of your career?”

And he said, “No, no. I believed in the role.”

You know, he’s Cuban. He’s a fervent anti-communist. Not a big pal of Fidel like Sean Penn and some of the others.