“How Reality Is Structured”: ‘Jesus Thirsts’ and Director Tim Moriarity Turn Theology Into Box Office Gold

Jesus Thirsts: The Miracle of the Eucharist has grossed nearly $3 million at the box office since its release in June, making it not just the most successful documentary of 2024 so far but one of the few doc hits since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Notably, the highest-grossing documentary to come out in this era, last year’s After Death, is also a Christian film. Appealing to a “faith-based” demographic appears to be one draw for audiences amid a difficult environment for theatrical nonfiction.

Aimed mainly at Catholics, Jesus Thirsts is agitprop for the church’s official teachings about the Eucharist—the rite wherein bread and wine blessed by a priest is administered to the faithful, in the process actually becoming the body and blood of Christ in a process called transubstantiation. Many contemporary Catholics profess to view the eucharist in a solely symbolic light; this film seeks to discourage this and reaffirm the literal qualities of transubstantiation. Though it primarily surveys people around the world to hear their testimonies, it also features theologians and similar scholars explaining the finer intricacies of doctrine. There is one detour in which a priest claims that living human tissue has been detected in blessed communion bread.

To better understand the film’s aims, production, and marketing strategy, Documentary spoke with director and producer Tim Moriarity over the phone. Moriarty is executive director of Castletown Media, which fundraises and creates promotional materials primarily for Catholic causes and subjects, and which previously released the documentary Mother Teresa: No Greater Love. This interview has been edited and condensed for time and clarity.

DOCUMENTARY: What spurred the creation of a film on such a specific theological topic? Who provided the funding for it?

Tim Moriarty: The genesis is it was funded privately by Steve Greco, a deacon in the Catholic Church in Orange County. He has a relationship with Jim Wahlberg, the brother of Mark and Donnie. Jim had a remarkable experience of being incarcerated, suffering from addiction, and having a really profound experience when Mother Teresa visited the prison he was in. Since then, he’s been involved in film production in the faith-based space, but also in the addiction space. My company met Jim while working on a documentary about Mother Teresa in 2022. It was produced for her order, the Missionaries of Charity, and funded by the Knights of Columbus. So out of this friendship and this conversation Jim had with Steve Greco, there was the thought to do a film about the Eucharist.

There was a Pew research study in 2019 that showed that 70% of Catholics in the pews don’t have a deep understanding of what the teaching is around the Eucharist. And so there was a desire to do this film to not just explain what the Eucharist is, but to try to give people a sense of what the sacrament is. It’s really a daunting task, to be honest. With a documentary, a biography or a current event or historical event, is one thing. But this is a kind of theological teaching. There was a lot of trepidation about how to do it and not make it overly cerebral or just catechetical.

D: As a production company with a specialty focus, is finding funding generally this kind of process of connecting the right private organizations and people with subjects that interest them?

TM: Sometimes it’s through organizations, like the Knights of Columbus and the Mother Teresa film. But our funding also often comes through people who want to tell these stories. I’ll give you another example. We’re working on a film right now about Carlo Acutis, the first millennial canonized as a saint. There was a guy in Beaumont, Texas who was really moved by the story and reached out to Jim and me to do a project. We do come up with our own ideas and pitch them to investors, but our last two films have been made possible by individuals who really wanted a story told and put forward the means to do so.

D: And you’ve partnered with Fathom to distribute this and some of your other films.

TM: That’s right. All three of the films I mentioned—this one, the Mother Teresa, the Carlo Acutis film—have been distributed through Fathom. They’ve been a great partner for us. Fathom’s unique in that they are very open to films with niche audiences, because of the model they have where they’re finding theaters for those different audiences. And we come to them not just with our films, but with strong marketing plans for galvanizing our particular audience.

D: Does Fathom participate in the advertising as well, or are you left to your own devices there?

TM: Fathom will do their own marketing through their channels, but they do want the organization behind a film to have a plan, and the responsibility is ultimately with that organization. For these films, the marketing strategy is focused on a grassroots effort. Part of it is getting stories out there, forming relationships with journalists who are interested in a certain aspect of a film. There’s a paid aspect as well, in terms of digital ad placements in outlets that are going to be connected to this specific audience. There are also relationships with influencers and personalities who have followings, again in this specific space. And when we’re working on a film, we don’t just think through the story we’re trying to tell, but also the story about our efforts making it. Telling that story helps get some of the coverage you need to sell tickets.

D: The film mentions the annual National Eucharistic Congress, which is happening again soon. Is there a connection between that event and this production?

TM: Yes. Probably the largest initiative underway in the Catholic Church in America right now is what they’re calling a “Eucharistic revival.” This multi-day gathering in Indianapolis, where they’re expecting tens of thousands of people at Lucas Oil Stadium, is part of that. This film is in many ways an attempt to be a tool in service to that larger work, reminding Catholics about core teachings.

D: And you’re primarily trying to reach younger audiences here. We know the film is a box office success, but do you know whether as much of that viewership has been young people as you’ve hoped?

TM: Right now, people are buying tickets directly through Fathom, so we’d need to go to them for concrete details about the demographics of who’s buying. On an organic level, looking at the feedback we’ve been getting through emails and phone calls, we’ve been really struck by how the film has impacted young people, or teachers at Catholic schools and other religious educators, how they’re interested in using the film.

We went to four different continents and tried to show the universality of the faith. So there’s a segment about a missionary in Uganda, one about a Vietnamese bishop who was imprisoned for 13 years, stories of Slovenian nuns, prisoners (many of whom are serving life sentences) in Texas. There was an attempt to show the broadness of the appeal, the ways in which people from all walks of life are finding tremendous meaning and spiritual nourishment in the Eucharist.

D: How did you find the young people whom you speak to in the film itself?

TM: One of the things we wanted to do was take the temperature of the culture. We tried to find people who were raised Catholic, and we told them we were doing a film about the Eucharist and wanted to ask them a couple questions. It was just a matter of going out on the street with a camera. Some people didn’t want to talk, but a lot were very open to sharing their thoughts. The intention was to give an honest look at how people understand this subject.

Toward the end of the film, we meet young people at a conference called SEEK, where 25,000 young Catholics from different college campuses meet. We bookend the film with interviews about whether the Eucharist has become this kind of dead symbol from the past on the one hand and with young people who have found a great deal of spiritual nourishment and meaning through it on the other.

D: I was raised Evangelical, and we were taught that communion was a symbolic process. For you and the other producers, what’s the concern with not viewing the Eucharist through a strictly literal lens?

TM: This tradition goes all the way back. It’s the incarnation of Christ, where he becomes flesh and blood, carries on sacramentally through the Eucharist. The whole idea of a sacrament is that it’s a visible sign of an invisible reality. So our bodies, the material world, all of it is an expression of this kind of invisible spiritual realm. That’s very important to Catholics, to such an extent that at Vatican II in 1960s, they called the Eucharist “the source and summit of the Christian life.” I think what they meant by that is we are beings made up of both spirit and a material component. 

There’s perhaps an impulse, especially in modernity, where you see a split between matter and spirit. This takes on almost an obscene sort of form with Rene Descartes, where we’re just kind of ghosts in a machine, where the material world is a kind of machine, and what really matters is this thinking thing. The crux of Catholicism is that we can encounter the divine in our material form through these sacraments. There’s this material component to one’s relationship with God. That’s why the church is very strong on a proper understanding of the Eucharist as a real encounter with Christ’s body and blood.

D: That emphasis on embodiment, the physical link to spiritual matters, has always struck me as an outsider to Catholicism. Do you worry that dismissing the Eucharist would undermine broader issues of faith? Does doubt on this one teaching lead to doubt on others?

TM: Yeah, I think so. My big concern right now—and it kind of fits into this next film we’re working on—is a sense that we’re losing the real for the virtual. There’s something about the rise of modern technology, how we’re living on screens, which is reaching this almost unimaginable moment with AI. Some philosophers, like Baudrillard, have talked about the disappearance of the real for the simulacra, where the map has replaced the actual territory. I think in many ways, we’ve lost sense of the real depth and meaning of the body, of the material world. You see the ramifications of that, from ugly architecture to a disregard of the natural world to the sense what I do with my body doesn’t matter, because what I really am is some spirit that’s somewhere inside me. 

So for me, safeguarding the teaching on the Eucharist has ramifications for a whole host of things. It goes fundamentally to questions about reality and the relationship between spirit and matter. What’s the relationship between consciousness and the manifested world that we can bump into with our senses? This is a deep philosophical question, and the Catholic answer is very wrapped up in its sacramental theology, most chiefly its teaching on the eucharist. That’s why we don’t just want to tell people, “Oh, you must believe this because then you’re part of the club.” It’s more saying the teaching is coming out of a fundamental orientation toward how reality is structured.

Dan Schindel is a freelance critic and full-time copy editor living in Brooklyn. He has previously worked as the associate editor for documentary at Hyperallergic.