Here’s a (real) surprise: Prime-time TV show has a positive priest character

People who get to know me realize very quickly that I’m a fan of sci-fi television. It’s not uncommon for me to watch episodes from the Stargate or Star Trek franchises, even if I’ve seen them a dozen times.

Knowing this, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that I’ve been watching the TV series “V”, based on the 1983 TV series, about a race of malevolent aliens known as Visitors and humanity’s struggles against them. What is a surprise about this series is one of the characters: Fr. Jack Landry. V has probably the only major, regularly occurring character on TV today that is a Catholic priest shown in a good light.

Sure, priests show up on Law and Order and other shows, but rarely are they presented positively. Most of the time, they are either bad characters or more than willing to betray the priesthood. For example: unlike the priest in Hitchcock’s I Confess, I know of at least one episode of Law and Order where the priest breaks the seal of the confessional to save his own skin.

Fr. Landry on V is different. He doesn’t question his faith, but rather whether his faith leads him to fight the Visitors. As the New York Post puts it, Fr. Landry is a “heroic priest”, seeing his fight against the Visitors as part of his priestly service to the people he has been called to serve. The NY Post article has a great synopsis of the character and the actor, Joel Gretsch, behind the character, and is worth reading.

This is not to say that Fr. Landry’s task is easy. A couple episodes have included his struggle over whether or not any loss of human life is acceptable. There is a developing attraction between Fr. Landry and a female character, which is a risk for any priest, but so far it’s been completely hands off. His pastor has been fooled by the lies the Visitors have been broadcasting and is supportive of them, leading to some friction between the two priests, a very real aspect of priestly life.

While those of us who are priests aren’t called to fight against alien visitors bent on conquering our world, we are fighting against “powers and principalities” according to St. Paul. We are in a conflict against sin, evil, and the Devil. At stake is not only the lives of humans, but our eternal souls. In response, priests should be heroic: heroic in their prayers, heroic in their words, heroic in their actions.

Priests have gotten a bad name due to the sins of a few of our brothers, and with good reason: it should have never been allowed to become such a serious problem. But it happened, and we can’t change the past. We can only shape the future. As priests, we need to be as heroic in our ministries as the fictional character Fr. Jack Landry is in his.