If you’re Catholic, and have an aunt or other relative who’s expressed agitation that pretty much every movie in which the Church figures nowadays focuses on a scandal, “Hesburgh” may do your relative a world of good. The documentary about the Rev. Theodore M. Hesburgh, who was president of the University of Notre Dame for 35 years, is a portrait of a man who can be seen as not merely blameless, but genuinely heroic.

Buttressed by narration culled from the priest’s own reminiscences (read by Maurice LaMarche), the movie, directed by Patrick Creadon, is most impressive in recounting Hesburgh’s tireless work, from the 1950s to the ’70s, on the United States Commission on Civil Rights. This commission, among other things, laid the groundwork for the Civil Rights Act of 1964.