End of a Priest

About

‘But I’ve only sinned once. Ere morning till night.’ 

An awkward and somewhat unhappy churchwarden quits his job at a big city church to find a new life in a remote mountain village. By a tragicomic coincidence, he is considered the new parish priest whom the forlorn community desperately searches for and needs. Having tried in vain to explain and escape the part in a ‘miracle’, the churchwarden eventually accepts the role of the accidental saviour. His unorthodox ways and understanding for all human sins and weaknesses capture the hearts of the peculiar villagers. However, he clashes with the local teacher, who used to be the local celebrity and authority and who promotes ‘non-spiritual’ education. The faith of a man who has humbly assumed the desired task thus stands in juxtaposition to the self-confident ‘common sense’. But what if not everything is as it seems?

The original novel by Josef Škvorecký is based on a contemporary piece of news about a purported priest who served in Czech mountains for almost a year without being uncovered. Director Evald Shorm made it into a film, a masterpiece of the Czech New Wave, starring Vlastimil Brodský and Jan Libíček. Nonetheless, the story of the village where the old traditions have been obliterated is not necessarily linked to the 1950s, in which the novel is set, or the late 1960s, when Evald Schorm made his film. The metaphor branching out into several directions is actually a cynical parable set at an indefinite time and place, yet conveying a very definite message. It touches on topics that remain highly relevant to date: the conflicts between urban and rural areas, the aggressive atomization of social bubbles, and the difference between ‘to comprehend and to understand’, and ‘to believe and to have faith’.