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*Priest*
Category: Drama, Homosexual Year: 1994 Company: Miramax Running time: 98 mins USA - 105 min UK Rating in US: R
Starring:	Linus Roache , Tom Wilkinson , Robert Carlyle
Director:	Antonia Bird
Producer:	George Faber, Josephine Ward

Priest is a British film, made in Liverpool, which was shown in 1994 at the Toronto International Film Festival.

It is a drama directed by Antonia Bird and starring Linus Roache. Father Greg (Roache) is a Roman Catholic priest struggling between his calling as a priest in an inner-city parish, his personal traditional conservatism and his homosexuality, while dealing with the sanctity of the confession in regard to knowledge that he obtained in confession about a local father that is sexually abusing his own daughter.

Five stories overlap.

Fr. Greg's clash with the liberalism of his parish priest.
Fr. Greg's problems as someone from a comfortable middle class background in working in a poor working class area.
The clash between Fr. Greg's traditionalism and his homosexuality.
The clash between Fr. Greg's unhappiness at the heterosexual sex life of his parish priest with his own struggle with his own homosexual desire.
The revelation in confession that Mr. Unsworth, a parishioner, is sexually abusing his daughter, with the priest caught between a desire to reveal the abuse and his obligation to uphold the mandatory confidentiality of information supplied in confession.

When the mother walks in on her husband, molesting her daughter, she and other parishoners are furious that the priest did not break the Church policy. The priest however argued that he could not reveal confidential information supplied in confession, but had tried to engineer situations where the father's actions could be discovered, such as sending the mother, his housekeeper, home unexpectedly in the hope that she would catch her husband. However when Roache is arrested for having sex with his boyfriend in a parked car, the parishoners reserve themselves with some defend the Church policy against homosexuality. Roache is supported by a heterosexual priest that defends him in front of the Church ("does God care what a man does with his penis?") and this promotes a brief verbal shouting match about what the Bible says about homosexuality. At the end of the film, when parishioners boycott Fr. Greg when he gives out the Eucharist, queuing instead to receive communion from the other priest, one person breaks the boycott; the young woman who had been sexually abused. Her Christian forgiveness is contrasted with the judgmentalism of others.

Yet despite protests from the Catholic Church about the film, it does not openly reject the Church's belief that homosexuality is wrong; Roache breaks up with his boyfriend when the affair becomes public. Instead the final outcome is, as in real life, ambiguous. Fr. Greg does not advocate allowing priests to be sexually active, or openly question the Church's policies on homosexuality. Nor does he disown his orientation. Nor does the fact that he remains a priest indicate that he will live as a celibate: his parish priest throughout the film is shown to be in a longterm relationship with a woman. Instead Fr. Greg ceases to see issues in the black and white manner that had done at the beginning, and understands the complexity of his own identity, his Church and the community around him.

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Movies - Priest

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