Top 10 priests in fiction: how could she overlook Father Chantry-Pigg?

From whisky priests to reluctant exorcists, visionaries to hypocrites, literature is densely populated with a wide range of unfortunate clerics. Not for them the silent cloisters and deserted pews. They are forced into the spotlight by their authors, to be emotionally (and sometimes physically) tortured on their journey to salvation. 

Even as children, we are introduced to the idea of churches and monasteries as a setting for our stories. Perhaps the rules and boundaries of school are softly reflected in their walls, or perhaps in either location the subtlety social dynamics lead to small victories feeling like great triumphs. As adults, our fictional preachers are sent out into the world, to ask and answer life’s most difficult questions on our behalf. 

Some struggle with doubts about their own faith, many with the doubts of others, a few battle with demons of a very literal kind. And whilst the vicar in my novel, The Trouble with Goats and Sheep, escaped without injury, not everyone is so fortunate. Whether their suffering is of the flesh, like Damien Karras in The Exorcist, of the mind, in John Boyne’s A History of Loneliness, or whether their torment is entirely self-inflicted, clerics in fiction never have an easy time of it.