Filmmaker sees dream come true in documentary on Gothic churches
Branden Stanley, left, works with Bishop Robert E. Barron of Winona-Rochester in Minnesota, and Devin Dailey, who works for Word on Fire, a ministry founded by Bishop Barron, on July 15, 2025, in Notre Dame Cathedral in Rheims, France. Stanley, who grew up in the Archdiocese of Indianapolis, is a co-director of Heaven in Stone and Glass, a documentary narrated by Bishop Barron about Gothic churches in France. (Photo courtesy of Spirit Juice Studios)
By Sean Gallagher
Branden Stanley had big dreams when he started his own video production company as a teenager growing up near Indianapolis.
Now 34, a husband and father of five children, Stanley looks back on his early days as a filmmaker and laughs a bit as he sees a teenager wet behind the ears and more than a bit naïve.
Yet this former member of Our Lady of the Most Holy Rosary Parish in Indianapolis recognizes something true in his dreams from his homeschooled high school years.
“I had a desire to create something of lasting beauty,” recalled Stanley in a recent interview with The Criterion.
To hone and expand his knowledge of videography, he studied at Ball State University in Muncie, Ind.
Soon after graduating from there 12 years ago, Stanley was hired by Chicago-based Spirit Juice Studios, a video production company that seeks to contribute to the Church’s mission of evangelization. During his years at Spirit Juice, Stanley has risen to serve as its chief creative officer.
Through it all, he never forgot his high school dream.
Now, Stanley is days away from people across the country getting to see how that dream has come true.
About three years ago, Spirit Juice partnered with Word on Fire, a ministry founded by Bishop Robert E. Barron of the Diocese of Winona-Rochester in Minnesota, to create the 90-minute feature-length documentary Heaven in Stone and Glass.
It will be shown in more than 1,000 theaters across the country, including several in and near the archdiocese, on Sept. 20 and 23, with additional dates and theaters possibly to come.
The documentary, narrated by Bishop Barron, explores the profound beauty and deep spiritual meaning of five medieval Gothic churches in France: the cathedrals of Notre Dame in Paris, Notre Dame in Chartres,
Notre Dame in Rheims and Notre Dame in Amiens, and the abbey church of San Denis in Paris.
Stanley served as the co-director of the documentary, overseeing filming in all five churches during four trips to France that spanned 45 days.
“I can’t think of too many other things as permanent and as beautiful as these cathedrals. They’re kind of the definition of lasting beauty,” said Stanley, who described the documentary as “the perfect project for me.”
‘So much beauty’
The project, so focused on soaring beauty, was largely inspired by its near destruction when Notre Dame in Paris caught fire on April 15, 2019.
“The entire office was just glued to our screens,” Stanley said, recalling his memories of the day. “It was really difficult to work that day.”
In a Word on Fire podcast, Bishop Barron recalled how sad he was that day, thinking back to the times in the early 1990s when he had been a tour guide at Notre Dame in Paris when he was a graduate student in the city.
But then he was struck by the strong reaction across society to the fire at the cathedral, wondering why people in a culture that was becoming increasingly secular would experience such heartbreak at the potential loss of a medieval church. Could it be, he wondered, because beautiful churches like Notre Dame in Paris speak to the deep desire for divine transcendence that is in every human heart, despite the growing tendency of people to turn away from the practice of any faith?
Questions like this were the starting point for Heaven in Stone and Glass.
After five years of restoration work, Notre Dame in Paris reopened for worship and visitors in December 2024. Not long afterward, Stanley and the team from Spirit Juice visited to do filming there.
It was Stanley’s first visit to the historic cathedral, and he was struck by its “fresh appearance.”
Even before the 2019 fire, Notre Dame in Paris, much like other medieval churches, had walls and ceilings that had become darkened over time by the soot of countless candles burning there.
All of that grime, in addition to the damage from the 2019 fire, was cleaned off. Walking into Notre Dame after its restoration gave Stanley and other visitors something of a view of what the church might have looked like when it was first completed some 800 years ago.
“So much of it had been restored and worked on and cleaned, that it was difficult to kind of rectify in my head that this was a newly restored building in a lot of ways,” Stanley said, “but one which maintained the beauty and design that a building from 800 years ago has. Those two things don’t often match in my head.”
As wonderful of an experience Stanley had not only at Notre Dame in Paris but also in Chartres, Rheims, Amiens and
San Denis, the visits to those churches were very much times of work for him.
“We didn’t have a whole lot of time once we were there,” he said. “So much of our time was in setting cameras up and trying to get the appropriate shot and trying to locate things within the church, when there’s so much detail.”
Still, Stanley knows that the encounters he had with these centuries-old churches, filled from floor to ceiling with faith-imbued beauty, will have a lasting effect.
“When you’re immersed so much in all of that, you’re still going to get something,” he said. “There’s so much beauty around you, and it’s packed in so tightly that, even though it is work and you’re kind of having to focus on the task at hand, I think it’s hard to not feel something being in there.”
A hope to inspire ‘some introspection’
As much as Stanley had a dream when he was a teenager of what he wanted to do, he also had a clear idea then of what he wanted to avoid.
“I didn’t want to work on things that were a passing fad, something that you watch and forget about,” he said.
Secular media, especially in the film industry, Stanley said, sees movies just as “a form of entertainment” and as the final goal for secular filmmakers.
That’s not the approach that Stanley and his colleagues at Spirit Juice take.
“Certainly, we want Heaven in Stone and Glass, along with all the rest of our work, to be entertaining,” he said. “But that is not the end. The end of it is to inspire change in individuals.
“My hope is that, by seeing these beautiful buildings on the screens, whether in the theater or whether at home, that it inspires some introspection. How much are we doing to preserve the beauty of our faith? How much are we doing to further the beauty of our faith?”
Stanley also hopes that the documentary will be a way for viewers to get closer to the historic churches in France than they’ve ever gotten before.
“I think about the people who will get to experience the cathedrals who might not have the opportunity to go and visit them in person,” he said. “This documentary brings so many visuals of the cathedrals into local theaters. After that, once it’s available on streaming or for purchase, it will be in so many homes as well.”
As dedicated as Stanley was in creating this documentary to help viewers see the beauty of the Catholic faith for the first time or to delve into it more deeply, he knew that he, and especially his wife Alea, had to make sacrifices for that to happen, including the 45 days he spent away from her and their four children, who range in age from 8 to 15 months, with a fifth child who was born earlier this month.
“I think my wife definitely had the harder job between the two of us, since I was gone for such an extended period of time,” Stanley said. “That said, I think 10 years ago I would have welcomed every bit of being able to travel.
“But honestly, going into this, outside of the fact that I was excited to film the piece and to get started, I was also kind of dreading it a bit because it had been a while since I’d been away from the kids and from Alea for so long.”
Many put ‘heart and soul into this’
Stanley has now worked on a variety of projects during the past 10 years with Bishop Barron, who is only surpassed in social media followers in the Catholic world by his fellow Chicago native, Pope Leo XIV.
Yet, Stanley says it’s “always been a joy” to spend time with him.
“He’s incredibly down to earth and humble,” Stanley added. “He’d talk with every member of the crew and learn about their background.”
Stanley was also impressed by how Bishop Barron could speak at some length in off-the-cuff moments in the documentary when he was asked to answer questions.
“He would just go and begin talking without skipping a beat,” Stanley said. “It was from the heart and impactful. Honestly, it’s a bit uncanny how much he can, just in one take, go through it all, and it’s perfect.”
Stanley is looking forward to watching the documentary in a theater with his Spirit Juice co-workers.
“We see it a lot on our small monitors here as we were working through it,” he said. “And we do have a projector set up to view it in our studio, but it’s still nothing like going to a theater and experiencing it that way.”
In addition to being grateful for all that Alea did for him while he was away filming in France, Stanley also appreciates the work his Spirit Juice colleagues did on the documentary, even if his name is listed as “co-director.”
“A lot of people worked very tirelessly on this piece to make it happen …,” he said. “So many different people put their heart and soul into this because they knew that it was incredibly important.”
(For more information on Heaven in Stone and Glass, including where and when it will be shown in theaters in and near the archdiocese, and to purchase tickets, go to heaveninstoneandglass.com.) †
