Commentor Sean's description of his admirable priest-uncle reminded me a some thoughts I had back in 2009 about how Hollywood and entertainment in general portray priests.
a. heartless orthodox organization men bent on political power
b. the misunderstood (usually lefty rebel) victims of the above men
c. tortured but hot semi-believers having an affair (straight or gay)
d. doddering clueless old capons with all the testosterone of Barney the Dinosaur*
e. nutcase exorcists or apocalyptic conspiracy freaks
And nowadays, of course,
f. sexually twisted creeps, interested in diddling kids.
If I recall The X-Files corpus, they managed to hit pretty well all of these cartoons. At least once.
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*This is the standard Protestant pastor. A variation was Stephen Collins in 7th Heaven, a very popular TV program about a pastor and his family. In real life the handsome Mr Collins is as confusedly unmoored as his character: he's an Episcopalian who's an Advanced Yogic Flying practitioner of Transcendental Meditation.
Produced by Reb Aaron Spelling, the show was all about wholesome but undogmatic moralism and good advice but almost completely empty of anything actually Christian. Unitarian in practice. (I can't imagine Reb Spelling and his ilk portraying a rabbi as some kind of non-denominational Dear Abby...but keeping the shell and eviscerating the meaning is a standard tactic with people like him.)
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