Faith, desire and defiance: revisiting Antonia Bird’s controversial drama Priest

When Antonia Bird’s Priest premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in September 1994, scandal felt inevitable. A British drama daring to confront sexual taboo within the Catholic Church, it arrived in a culture deeply unsettled by conversations about faith and sexuality. The backlash was swift: condemnation from Church authorities, calls for a ban in Ireland, and boycotts across America targeting Walt Disney Studios, parent company of distributor Miramax. Some even demanded Disney chief Michael Eisner’s resignation.

Attempts to suppress the film largely failed. In Ireland, the censor board approved its release – its first open defiance of Church influence. Critics, however, were divided. Roger Ebert dismissed the film in the Chicago Sun-Times: “What I object to is the use of the church as a spice for an otherwise lame story; take away the occupations of the central characters, and the rest of the film’s events would be laid bare as tiresome sexual politics.”  His view echoed a wider perception of Priest as a shallow provocation rather than serious cinema.

But Bird’s intentions were far from sensationalist. The film follows Father Greg Pilkington (Linus Roache), a Liverpool priest torn between his Christian vows and his homosexuality. Around him swirl other hypocrisies: a colleague’s affair with the housekeeper, a parish family fractured by abuse. Bird frames these conflicts not as polemic but as human struggle – pain, guilt and the fragile pursuit of grace. “I’m interested globally in inequality and injustice,” she told Bomb Magazine. “This film deals with those things, specifically with one person’s life, personal dilemmas, pain, and guilt.”

Bird’s background in television drama – her 1993 TV film Safe tackled cruelty in the welfare system – shaped her approach. Priest feels like a continuation of that concern for moral complexity. Rather than indicting religion wholesale, Bird interrogates how desire collides with belief inside rigid traditions. Roache’s Father Greg is not a symbol of censure but a portrait of torment, his story grounded in character rather than ideology.

Three decades on, Priest reads differently. What was once incendiary now feels contemplative. In the intervening years, the Catholic Church has faced relentless scrutiny – from abuse scandals to February 2025’s controversial vote rejecting independent safeguarding oversight. A subplot involving incestuous abuse and the seal of confession resonates eerily with these failures, lending Bird’s film a prescience critics missed in 1994.

Its legacy is clearer too. Themes of moral conflict and institutional hypocrisy within the Church have since powered award-winning dramas like Philomena (2014), Spotlight (2015) and By the Grace of God (2019). Priest can now be seen as their daring predecessor – a film that insisted honesty and forgiveness matter more than dogma. Seen today, it feels less like sacrilege than a plea for emotional courage. And that, as a later Time Out review observed, it has in spades.

Priest is out now on BFI Blu-ray.