“In the Name of Every Man Who Hurt You, Forgive Me” 

Eduardo Verástegui’s tearful plea came before 3,000 girls at Girlstown in Chalco, Mexico, a fraction of the 20,000 children the Sisters of Mary mother back to health worldwide—children the Mexican actor has come to cherish.

The sun was sinking against two snow-capped volcanoes when Eduardo Verástegui looked out over a sea of teenage girls who sat before him in a mammoth gymnasium in Mexico. They wore blue skirts, white blouses, bobby socks, and black saddle shoes—like figures from an old black-and-white drawing pulled from a chapter on purity in the Baltimore Catechism.

The former playboy and heartthrob knew who these girls were. They were his native land’s bullied and forgotten ones, the pure victims from Guerrero, Oaxaca, Durango, Veracruz, Puebla, Jalisco, and numberless other villages torn apart by gangs, corruption, and the violence of poverty. Many of them had survived depraved acts inflicted by men.

Verástegui knew what God did; to a degree, he had played a part. So as the once-wounded man looked into the eyes of the wounded, everything became blurry. And all fell silent as three thousand or so teenage girls watched the Mexican actor’s eyes grow heavy. Only the chirring of locusts and the distant barks of dogs broke the silence when Verástegui—overcome by emotion—fell to his knees. 

At the rear of the gymnasium, behind row after row of the girls, stood 52 Sisters of Mary, who saw that his heart had become wrung with sorrow. These were the nuns who had given their lives to mother their spiritual daughters back to wholeness. Now they watched the producer, director, and actor of Sound of Freedom struggle to find the words. 

At last, he spoke.

“Please, girls, listen to me,” he said, tears now falling. 

I grew up in a very macho culture. I was taught that a real man was a womanizer, a Latin lover, a Casanova—and I believed the lie.

For years, I cheated on my girlfriends. I used them. I hurt them.

And I know many of you have been hurt by a man—maybe by more than one. If that’s true, I know many of you carry wounds in your heart that haven’t yet healed.

If this is so, I want to ask you something:

In the name of all the men who’ve hurt you—please, forgive me. I am sorry for what I’ve done to you.

As he looked into the silence, the weeping began. Three thousand trembling girls broke open. Some collapsed into the shoulder of a classmate beside them. The ones loudly sobbing found Sisters rushing to their sides. Virtually each girl was experiencing a flood of emotions—where torrents of haunted memory met release.

For most of the girls, it was the first time a man had ever apologized for the violence inflicted on them.

When the actor rose to his feet, he became one with them. For the next hour, they wept together, a shared release and a silent acknowledgment of one of Mexico’s deepest and most hidden wounds: the sexual and physical abuse so often endured within their own homes.

Some of the girls began to speak to him—quiet, hesitant voices sharing small fragments of childhood memories. 

Each girl tried to thank Verástegui for his outpouring before they streamed out of the gym like thousands of Jairus’ daughters. As they walked back to their dormitories scattered across Villa de las Niñas, the twin volcanoes seemed to stand prouder, like watchful fathers sending their daughters off to bed, heart-struck by the rare moment of grace. 

“It was the most beautiful experience in my life,” he said. 

I don’t think the girls saw me anymore. I think they saw all the men who hurt them and never apologized…I knew it would be hard for them to forgive fully. So I asked if they would close their eyes and ask God to give them the strength to forgive those men, so that they could finally work to be free…This is what the healing power of forgiveness is.

Verástegui continued: “Art is powerful. The art I chose was the Mexican playboy and womanizer,” he said of his roles as a Mexican soap opera star in the late ’90s. 

Young men and teenagers used to say to me, “Hey Eduardo, you’re my favorite actor! I do cocaine because of you. I’m with a lot of women because you”…And do you want to know the worst part? Back then, I didn’t see what they said to me as wrong…I was filled with arrogance and vanity, and I didn’t even know it.

When he turned 28, a voice coach in Los Angeles abruptly reconstructed the shape of his life. During six months of lessons, she often posed probing questions—gentle at first, but persistent. A few months in, her words became like carpet bombs, annihilating the walls of his conscience and empty soul.

“One by one—she came at me using the Socratic method,” he said. 

What is the purpose of your life? Are you using your talents for God? Where is God in your life? When you wake up, are you actually happy? Are you a part of the solution to the pain of the world, or are you part of the problem? Are you destroying or building up? Do you want a family someday; if so—are you the type of man you want your daughter to marry, one who is loyal, upright, and sacrificial?

“It was an awakening. I thought, ‘My God—I am part of the problem. I am the problem. I couldn’t think of a single film or soap opera character that helped Mexico and her children,” he said. “I had been a part of poisoning the mentality of Mexican youth.”

Really, I was dying back then and didn’t even know it. What hurt me the most was becoming aware that I had been offending God with the talents that He had given me. But the Catholic faith was not at the center of my life; I didn’t know it well; and how can you love what you don’t know?

Verástegui made a three-and-a-half-hour confession—an unburdening that marked the beginning of a radical conversion and return to the Catholic Faith. From that day forward, he consecrated himself to a new way of living, vowing never again to take part in any project that would offend God, dishonor his family, betray his Catholic faith, or undermine the dignity of his Latino heritage. And never again would he mistreat a woman.

He plunged into the sacraments, attending daily Mass and praying the Rosary with devotion. He adored Christ at Holy Hours. He embraced chastity, spoke tenderly with women outside abortion clinics, and gave his time in service to the poor. But transformation came at a cost.

After four years of turning down lucrative acting roles that conflicted with his new convictions, his finances had dried up. On the edge of homelessness, Verástegui confided in his spiritual director, Fr. Juan Rivas, in Los Angeles. He told the priest he planned to leave everything behind—to become a missionary and make reparation for his sin by serving the poorest of the poor in the wilds of the Amazon. He asked for the priest’s blessing.

“He stayed silent,” Verástegui recalled. 

Then he finally said, “How about this: give me two years in the jungle of Hollywood instead of the Amazon. Make reparation right here—by turning inside-out the shows you once acted in…And do it as a producer. I believe God will send you an army to help you.”

The rest is history. Shortly thereafter, Verástegui met fellow strugglers in Hollywood—Alejandro Gómez Monteverde and Leo Severino. Like him, they were hoping to break through the Hollywood muck with stories that inspired rather than degraded. On little more than faith and grit, they formed Metanoia Films and produced Bella (2006), a raw, pro-life drama that won the People’s Choice Award at the Toronto International Film Festival.

Years later, the team would go on to produce Sound of Freedom (2023), a global box-office smash hit that shook the industry—and signaled that their mission to help bring awareness to the trafficked had only just begun. The trio are now in the planning stages of making a sequel to Sound of Freedom.

It is Verástegui’s growing awareness of the global crisis of human trafficking and domestic sexual abuse that keeps drawing him back, year after year, to Girlstown in Chalco, Mexico. There, he says, he is continually overwhelmed by the Sisters’ unwavering work—their willingness to die to themselves each day in order to mend the girls’ shattered hearts through Christ and the healing graces of the sacraments.

In total, the Sisters of Mary care for more than 20,000 children at 16 Boystown and Girlstown communities throughout the world. Every one of the communities is like a saving ground, a field of goodwill and resurrection, where these faithful nuns educate, nourish, counsel, catechize, jog with, play sports with, and pray with their students; they never stop. “We are spiritual mothers to them first,” a sister said recently. “They have been through too much.” 

Before he died of ALS in 1992, the founder of their order, Washington, D.C., native Venerable Aloysius Schwartz, told the sisters, “The way we serve is to wear a constant crown of thorns.” 

The slow, tender eloquence of the Sisters’ maternal love pulls away layer after layer of wounds and horrors often too graphic for public consumption. The Sisters of Mary’s blood loyalty to their children has a singular aim: to give Christ to them. It is grueling work, but they know the secret of the saints: persevering love brings haunted hearts to healing and release.

Many children in Chalco, and at the Guadalajara school for boys, have worked fields barefoot since the age of seven or eight, often returning home to find no food on the table. Almost all have felt the fear of not knowing the whereabouts of their next meal. These children are raised in villages bathed in human trafficking, murder, addiction, and domestic violence.

Verástegui has paid visits to Girlstown in Chalco, Mexico, on ten occasions, where a comingling of sorrow, joy, and relief overwhelms him. He sees girls in the process of healing, where he knows after graduation they go on to become some of Mexico’s greatest Catholic missionaries. He said he makes frequent returns to Chalco because it is there that he sees the face of resurrection unlike any other place in the world. 

“These Sisters are heroes,” Verástegui said. “They are God’s solution in the war to protect and save children.”

How to help: Over the course of the past half century, over 175,000 children have graduated from the Sisters of Mary’s Boystown and Girlstown communities. World Villages for Children (WVC) is a nonprofit organization that financially supports the Sisters as they help children break free from a life of poverty and lead them to Christ. WVC provides food, shelter, clothing, medical expenses, Catholic education, and vocational training to more than 20,000 children in six different countries around the world. To donate to World Villages for Children, please go to https://www.worldvillages.org/poverty/.