Adulthood has held many surprises—that my mom really was right about everything, that cheese is criminally expensive—but for me one of the biggest has been the ascendance of the hot-priest trope.
I knew a lot of priests growing up, both in Catholic school, which I attended through the 12th grade, and at weekly mass with my family. It’s hard to lump the members of an entire profession together without flattening them into a stereotype: some priests were kind, some were funny, more than a few were grumpy. One went to jail and a few more allegedly belonged there. One taught me sex ed, one taught me French, one gave out mini Kit Kats when we were having a bad day. But one thing they had in common? Not a single one, ever, was hot.
Nevertheless, I can understand the basis for the fantasy—the profane thrill of lusting after a man of God. During our annual reenactment of the Stations of the Cross, the student who played Jesus had to be disrobed by “Roman soldiers” in front of the whole school, finally standing before us all in nothing but white boxer shorts. We weren’t supposed to whistle and cat call, but sometimes the heart wants what the heart wants.
Despite the dearth of hot priests when I was younger, they seem to be everywhere now. Just last week, the internet melted down over paparazzi photos of Josh O’Connor in a clerical collar on the set of Knives Out 3. (He’s actually a seasoned hot priest at this point, having already played one in Emma in 2020.) And, as more than one social media user has pointed out, the Knives Out cast also includes Andrew Scott, who has been lots of things as an actor, but to many will always be, first and foremost, the Hot Priest from Fleabag.
But where—and how—did all this begin? I encountered the founding father of the genre, so to speak, in a medieval French literature class. After Abelard, a priest, was hired to tutor the teenage Heloise in 12th-century Paris, the two had an illicit affair, chronicled in their surviving correspondence. It’s a long and dramatic story, one that involved Heloise becoming pregnant and then hiding out in a convent, and her uncle ultimately castrating Abelard as revenge. But, in short, Abelard’s priestly ambitions were at odds with his romantic and sexual liaisons, though the horny letters between him and Heloise were also deeply theological. Finally, when Heloise told Abelard that she couldn’t sleep in the convent because when she closed her eyes she had visions of their lovemaking, he told her to give all her love to Christ instead, and the two never saw each other again.
Hot priests would jump the pond when The Scarlet Letter was published in 1850, and it was revealed that the Rev. Arthur Dimmesdale was responsible for impregnating Hester Prynne. Since then, there have been hot priests in black and white (Montgomery Clift in I Confess and Gregory Peck in The Keys of the Kingdom) and hot priests in color (Christopher Reeve in Monsignor and Antonio Banderas in The Body). On TV, Samantha Jones has fallen for a hot priest, as have the Derry Girls. Jude Law played the hottest of all priests in HBO’s The Young Pope, and Grantchester has a hot Anglican priest ready to step in when the last crime-solving, cassock-wearing beefcake leaves the show (they’re currently on their third). There’s Richard Chamberlain in The Thorn Birds, Gabriel Byrne in Stigmata, and Liev Shreiber was just in Doubt. Ethan Hawke in First Reformed, like the hot priests in The Scarlet Letter and Grantchester, isn’t Catholic, but he’s a stud and he wears a collar, and that’s enough to qualify him.
Part of what makes the hot priest so compelling notionally is his unavailability: we all want what we can’t have, even—or, perhaps especially—when a vow of celibacy is involved. I often think about the moment in Season 2 of Fleabag when, sitting with Hot Priest at a bus stop, Fleabag looks into his eyes, knowing he’s made a choice about her, and asks, “It’s God, isn’t it?” (Even in the face of such formidable competition, she’d hoped that he—like any emotionally unavailable man—just might change for her.) Yet Phoebe Waller-Bridge, the show’s creator and star, has also offered another theory for why the fantasy persists: After joking, during a 2021 appearance on Saturday Night Live, that Fleabag’s second season came about to fulfill a personal desire (“It began as a way to get Andrew Scott to dress up as a priest and tell me that he loves me”), she went on to attribute the “horn-storm” that Scott’s character had inspired to an essential priestly quality—arguably, the most important part of their pastoral care. "Andrew and I were trying to figure out what it was about him that was driving women so mental,” she said, “and we boiled it down and realized it was because he was doing this one thing: listening. Really, really listening."
All the same, in the case of Heloise and Abelard, we see what happens when the girl really does get the priest—and it’s a nightmare. In many ways, the hot-priest fantasy is better left as just that.
Rome, the epicenter of regular priests (plus any hot ones that might have heard the calling), delivers exactly what lustful tourists want: for the past 20 years, Venetian photographer Pierro Pazzi has published the annual Calendario Romano, colloquially known as the hot priest calendar, featuring the hunkiest men of the cloth. Its 12 headshots show broody men staring directly into our souls—which, no doubt, many of us would love them to save.
On the Calendario Romano website, Pazzi writes: “This calendar intends to give basic information and some notes on the general characteristics of the Vatican with the hope of sating the thirst for knowledge continually demonstrated by the Eternal City’s visitors.” It sates more than one thirst, then: Pazzi, 62, prints 75,000 copies of the calendar per year, which apparently fly off the shelves all over Rome.
Only recently was it revealed, however, that the men in the calendar are not actually priests (nor are they even all Italian), a fact that serves to reinforce what I’ve known since Catholic school: Often, we hang on to the fantasy because the reality…isn’t actually hot.