The film opens inside a grand, hushed church. Over this peaceful image is Sister Rose's voice laying out some of the most common and venomous Catholic misconceptions about the Jews, most notably that they killed Jesus. "It will be hard for you to hear these things as it will be hard for me to say them," she tells us.

Released the same year as Mel Gibson's mega-blockbuster "The Passion of the Christ," this quiet movie follows sister Rose on a trip to her hometown of Plain, Wisconsin, to the Abbey where she took her orders, to middle schools where she lectures on the holocaust, and into intimate scenes in her home. Along the way the filmmakers craft a portrait of a woman from humble beginnings who, through her intelligence and persistence, managed to make fundamental changes in one of the biggest, oldest and most traditional institutions in the world.

Sister Rose grew up in a mostly Catholic town in rural Wisconsin (she recalls there being one Protestant Family). Her family was big, loving and full of prayer. She first encountered the idea of "the Jews" in Sunday school. From the start she couldn't understand why there was such mystery and hatred surrounding them. "Jesus was a Jew and we love him, so why don't we love the Jews," Sister Rose recalls asking in the film. But when she asked these questions to her parents, her teachers she got no definitive answers.

Sister Rose became a nun because she wanted to teach. "Nuns were teachers and I loved every one of them. I had Franciscan nuns in my family but I wanted to be a Dominican nun because I wanted to teach.," she told Rabbi Jack Bemporad in a recent interview.

After taking her orders she did her doctorate dissertation at the University of Saint Louis. Her subject was the treatment of Jews in Catholic textbooks. Her findings were shocking. In the film she recalls how she "almost got ill" reading these texts that were being used across the country to educate school children. As she reads some of the most antagonistic passages aloud her voice cracks with emotion. It becomes clear how painful it is, even now, for her to hear them.

Since receiving her docterate in 1961, she has done post-graduate work at Hebrew University and at Yad Vashem, the holocaust memorial in Jerusalem

Through the years she encountered resistance to her work. One bishop in Milwaukee asked her not to publish her findings. He said to her not to "hang our dirty laundry." But as Sister Rose tells us, "I listened to what he had to say and then I hung it."

It is that spirit of resistance that stands out throughout the film. This passionate woman, now confined to a wheelchair and shrunken by age, still refuses to be cowed. She is funny and loud and delightfully stubborn. In one scene, at a meeting about Jewish education at Catholic universities she boldly tells a colleague that these schools should either comply with Vatican II doctrine or "close up."

The doctrine she speaks of is especially close to her heart. In 1965, Pope John XXIII convened the 21st ecumenical council with the aims of bringing the Catholic Church into the modern age. When it came time to address Jewish-Catholic relations, Augustin Cardinal Bea requested Sister Rose's dissertation. Influenced by Thering's work, the Vatican issued "Nostra Aetate," a document that declared the Jews not responsible for the death of Jesus. This groundbreaking shift in church policy led to widespread changes in Catholic education throughout the world.

Even after this monumental victory, Rose has made combating anti-Semitism her ongoing life project. She is a professor emerita at Seton Hall University in South Orange, NJ in the department of Jewish-Christian studies, the only program of its kind in the country. She was instrumental in the passing of a bill that makes holocaust education mandatory in every school in New Jersey. And at 83, she continues to lecture at schools, conferences and even protests.

So, for Sister Rose Thering, this film is just another way to get her message out to as many people as possible.

"Once we acknowledge this whole history of discrimination against Protestants, Jews and Muslims then we can move forward together," she says. "But even then tolerance is not enough. We must not just tolerate but understand and eventually love people of other faiths. We are all children of god, striving to understand him in our own ways."

For more information about Sister Rose Thering, visit http://academic.shu.edu/thering/.