The religious callings are supposedly on crisis. Almost anybody any longer has the spirit, nor the body, for the harshness that a priestly or monastic life demands in the Catholic Church. Why then, in telenovelas, mainly the Mexican ones, do we still see so many priests and nuns? According to telenovelas, we should see hundreds of priests for square meter when we walk in the street; having almost one for each of us! How nice, we could interchange our priests and nuns as if they were stickers!

It’s difficult to find a Televisa telenovela in which there’s not at least one priest. The nuns usually appear in groups, or in bunches; and they are all dressed as the cannon says, with cassock, habit and wimple; all of them very cute, with their little shirts and their little bodices.

I’ve been in Mexico and, without prejudices about people’s religiousness, which is not obvious in their faces, you don’t see lots priests. It’s kind of as it’s here, if you see one with the outfit it’s like a rarity.

So why do we see such a demographic density of priests and nuns? Well, we guess that, partly, as we always say, and we’ll not explain it all again because we don’t want to tire out our audience but the thing is that telenovelas are not only remakes but also outdated stories which are not adapted to the new interests and tendencies of society. Fifty or sixty years ago, the priests were like the parsley of every sauce, or put in a different way, omnipresent and important, but it seems that some producers didn’t realize that the situation changed. Even if we admit that the Mexican society is more religious and traditional than our Spanish society, the calling crisis is a global thing, and doesn’t involve Spain alone.

There are other circumstances that also influence the fact that scripts include so many members of this religious order. To start with, this thing of having a priest in the script is wise because they have a very theatrical presence, with the cassock and the clerical collar. And what about the nuns? The nuns are very useful to accentuate the naïve character of the female protagonists. Having studied or having been raised by the nuns is a warranty of virginity in telenovelas.

If the character is a priest or a nun, the dialogs are simplified because they can meddle in whatever matter they want without provoking the expected reaction in whoever hears them, which would be, to tell them to go to hell. There go the priests and the nuns, doing and saying whatever they think is fine and the protagonists stay still, paralyzed. An important economy of work.

But the most important thing is the effect the participation of these characters cause – the religion, the guilt, the remorse, the limits and the conventions imposed by the Church create a source of controversy in a telenovela or in any melodrama as an element that produces a considerable amount of pain to our protagonists; and the more they suffer the more we like it. It’s also an insurmountable obstacle that keeps them apart for many episodes.

But the priests are not only those type of characters which we would normally consider ‘annoying’, in the sense that they disturb the protagonists’ happiness, but also they are dramatic characters, or protagonists themselves sometimes.

The nuns are not like that; they’re always out of place and they’re just bizarre. The only exception is the mother superior in “Alguna Vez Tendremos Alas“. Nuns are often comic characters, either old or young, whose only contribution is being prudish, and of course, very vivacious.

Going back to the priests, there are priests for all tastes in telenovelas: priests that are like stepfathers for their parishioners; priests that are consumed with doubts and temptation not to commit sin; priests that have already sinned and are then sorry and repentant for their sins, like Santiago in “Pasión”; priests that are so old that make everything wrong and screw things up, like the priest in “La Tormenta”; priests that are also old but wise, like the master of the little grasshopper; priests that are young and dynamic like the one in “Te Voy A Enseñar A Querer” (who was also a priest in “La Tormenta”, wasn’t he? Maybe I’m confused); priests that are funny like those in “Rayito De Luz”; priests that are tragic; priests that are nice; priests that are unpleasant, like the one in “Yago”; priests that suffer temptations, like in “Cristal” and “El Privilegio De Amar”; priests that provoke women, like Cristobal in “Alborada” or Pablo in “Milagros De Amor”; and even priests that are not priests (these are my favorites) like in “Padre Coraje” and “Milagros de Amor”.

Personally, leaving aside the false priests, that were a big source of controversy, the omnipresence of pre-council members of the Chruch, with all the typical topics, ends up being a bit tiring, with those old-fashioned ideas, as the folklore movies of the Spain of the 40’s and 50’s in which it seemed that you couldn’t be Spanish if you didn’t know Sevillian dance or didn’t say ‘cucha!’ (contraction of ‘escucha’, i.e. ‘listen!’) or ‘mi arrrrma!’ (the way in which an Andalusian would say ‘mi alma’, i.e. ‘my soul!’) every two seconds. This smells to mothballs and to something rancid. Every time that there’s a priest in a telenovela, those priests that seem to have come out of a comic, those priests ‘from the past’, my eyes get blank and they turn around towards the occipital bone…..agaaaain??!!!

The ‘real’ priests (to distinguish them from the ones that pretended to be), except for Juan Pablo Shuck, whose characters are nice just because he’s hot (I mean, I didn’t care whether the priest was good or not, the important thing was that he was hot).

The only character I liked is Anselmo in “Ladrón De Corazones“; he was a normal person, with doubts and flaws and could understand people’s weaknesses, because as it’s said when people talk about brave people, a brave person is not a person who doesn’t feel fear but the one that feels fear and defeats it. Father Anselmo was a great character, but he didn’t judge people, nor was he in a nuisance or came out with moralizing speeches but he preached with his example and, wonderfully, he let people live; since he knew that moral and religion don’t necessarily go hand in hand.

As priests seem to be a must in telenovelas (unless a miracle happens), why don’t they take Anselmo as a model and give us a break of those priests like Torquemada and Sister Citroén?