Sheen to play campaigning priest Father Shay Cullen

By Tom Prendeville
The Sunday World, October 29, 2006

West Wing star Martin Sheen could soon be starring in a blockbuster film based on the life of Irish priest and anti-paedophile campaigner, Shay Cullen.

The Hollywood actor and Fr Cullen became close friends due to the priest’s heroic work in fighting child sex abuse in the Philippines.

Human rights campaigner Fr Cullen is set to reveal all in a powerful no-holds barred autobiography, Passion and Power, which is due to be published next week.

Sheen is close personal friend of Fr Cullen and is helping to promote the book, the proceeds of which will go to charity.

The Hollywood star has also expressed a strong interest in making a film adaptation of the book and in playing the role of Father Cullen, who was nominated three times for a Nobel Peace Prize.

Inspiration

“Father Shay Cullen truly is a hero,” Sheen told Sunday World.

“I would be honoured to portray him in a movie. Thank God for Father Shay, he is a very powerful inspiration and has saved the lives of thousands of these poor children, and he’s helped jail some of the world’s most evil paedophiles. What he has achieved is nothing more than a miracle,” he added.

Dubliner Father Cullen went to Olongapo City in the Philippines in 1969. expecting a pleasant tropical backwater he was in for a shock. The novice Dun Laoghaire priest, who survived an assassination attempt, discovered horrific sexual exploitation and the systematic abuse of thousands of women and children enslaved in sub-human conditions.

The victims, some of whom were as young as nine years old, were enslaved in a sex industry that catered for the IS military and sex tourists.

Shocked and angered by what he saw, he set out to free the children and women from their dehumanizing conditions and founded the People’s Recovery Empowerment Development Assistance Foundation.

However, along the way he encountered ferocious opposition from both organized crime and a corrupt political elite which resulted in an assassination attempt of his life.

Deserving

Sheen first encountered Fr Cullen when he was in the Philippines in 1979 during the making of Apocalypse Now. Sheen said: “Thee is no one more deserving of a Nobel Prize than Fr. Shay.” Cullen lives full time in the Philippines.

Passion and Power by Killynon House Books is prices Euros 12.99 End.