Home † Treatment † Script †
Characters & Setting † Producers †
Meet the writers † The Church & Sex † Famous Ex-Seminarians † About

Backstory Note

Young Catholic men who wish to become priests go to a seminary chosen by their bishop.  The practice of having official institutions dedicated solely to the formation of priests began with a decree by the Council of Trent in 1563.  Today, minor seminaries are generally the equivalent of a four-year college, with the addition of specialized courses and co-curricular activities to help in the acculturation of seminarians to priestly life. 

Until the late 1960s, however, a minor seminary consisted of high school and the first two years of college.  Boys as young as 13 were admitted as seminarians.  After graduating from a minor seminary, candidates advance to a major seminary to study philosophy, church history, and theology (including moral theology), become yet more acculturated to the Vatican’s rules of the game, and to practice for a life of pastoral ministry. 

In the mid 1960s a new dawn of openness and fresh thinking seemed to be on the verge of overcoming centuries of ossified doctrine and repressive practices in the church.  The stories of Visiting Sunday are set during those stirring years.  The wider cultural and political changes of the 1960s made those years, at one and the same time, all the more magic, hopeful, and traumatic for seminarians.

The film opens late evening at Saint Mark Seminary on a Visiting Sunday in May 1968.  Outside the walls of the seminary, the student revolution in Paris is a fitting bookend to the graduating class’s six years at Saint Mark’s, a journey that began with the nuclear dread of the Cuban Missile Crisis.

But tonight, the members of the Sixth Class have other things on their mind.  Daniel J. Yeats (D.J., 20, lean, six-footer, scholar) and classmates complete their class play, Hamlet, the night before graduating from Saint Mark’s.  Seminarians and guests, including nuns from nearby Saint Monica Convent, applaud and head for the cast party.

D.J. ducks away for a long-awaited tryst with Sister Faith (19, sensuously pretty, dreamer), a novice from Saint Monica’s.  In an all-white habit, Faith sneaks off after him.  The two meet outside the seminary auditorium, exchange longing looks in the dark, and run to a side entrance to the abbey church.  They race up the stairs to the bell tower and listen as a monk rings the bell to summon the monks for Compline, the last Divine Office of the day.  A seminarian and a nun had fallen in love, and suddenly the Council of Trent, Canon Law, the Roman Curia, church bells, incense, theology, the Pope, and six years of spiritual direction seem remote, meaningless.

At the exact same time that tryst in the bell tower is unfolding, D.J. and Faith’s friend FRANK (19, stocky, goody-goody) kneels in his cassock and Roman Collar on the steps of the church portico.   As the Barnabian monks of Saint Mark Abbey chant the night prayers of Compline, Frank clutches a sharpened-metal crucifix, fingers his rosary beads, and mumbles incoherent prayers of anguish.  He stares up at a backlighted stained-glass window depicting the dead Christ slumped in the arms of the Blessed Virgin Mary.  The “Piéta.”

D.J. and Frank’s families miss the two seminarians and speculate as to why they’ve disappeared.  SISTER PERPETUA (Perp, fifties, Valkyrie on steroids), the novice mistress at Saint Monica’s, confronts the families and inquires as to where Faith has gone.  D.J. and Frank’s buddy JOHN (20, mixed race, athletic, conspiracy theorist) volunteers to find the three missing souls.

In the bell tower Faith sets out a circle of votive candles, D.J. lights them, and the two disrobe each other.  They make love as the monks chant below.  Faith’s songs of passion rise and fall with the chants of the monks.  An exhilarating polyphony of the sacred and the profane.

When the monks conclude chanting Nunc Dimittis, the canticle that ends Compline, Frank desperately begins to saw away at his wrists with the crucifix.  Now dismiss your servant, Lord.

The timeline jumps to a present-day cabin in the Rocky Mountains, where the contemporary 50-SOMETHING D.J. writes about his six years at Saint Mark Seminary.

From these retrospective reflections, the story flashes back to fall 1962, when the 14-year-old D.J. and his friends enter First Class at Saint Mark’s right after eighth grade, aspiring to become a priests.  Their early years there are idyllic and inspirational, fun even as the world teeters on the edge of nuclear annihilation.  The boys enjoy the seminary woods, play sports, and fish together.  D.J. excels at Latin and puzzles at the harsh spiritual texts read at the beginning of each meal.  Frank is a born naturalist and starts a collection of butterflies and moths.

The highlight of every month is Visiting Sunday, when families and guests come to visit and seminarians get back in touch with the real world, as much as they dare.  Visiting Sundays are also opportunities for D.J. and his buddies to flirt with cute sisters of classmates, and for cute sisters to tease the seminarians seductively.  Seminarians and cute sisters flit from picnic table to picnic table in search of sugary desserts and corporeal delights.

The guys pour out their souls in the confessional.  D.J. has a phobia of confession and becomes confused when FATHER DISMAS (Dis - pronounced ‘Diz,’ forties, bearded popinjay) suggests that D.J. can ward off carnal temptation if he lets Father Dis bless his penis in the confessional.  Dis attempts to penetrate D.J.’s reluctance by threatening the boy with eternal damnation in hell.  D.J. parries spontaneously and effectively by projectile vomiting through the confessional grate.

Life at Saint Mark’s is full of ridiculous rules and odd practices.  Infractions of rules, even innocent mistakes or lapses, are punished by “kneeling out” with arms outstretched in front of the prefects table at the beginning of a meal.  The Barnabians no doubt adopted this practice from the Spanish Inquisition.  What’s proper spiritual formation without disgrace, humiliation, and pain?  Most of the monk teachers seem confused and outdated: they wear brick red dress-like habits, live together, act bitchy toward one another, and smoke way too much in a not-so subtle phallic sublimation.  The prefects, the principal disciplinarians, use the confessional to dig up secrets and exploit them as instruments of control and punishment.  And seduction.

The boys find a trustworthy guide and friend in Father Fabian (Fab, thirties, handsome), the seminary infirmarian, who is true to his vows and mission in life.  The boys learn that he is the only monk in whom they can truly place their trust.  Father Fab is also the chaplain at Saint Monica’s and serves as Faith’s confessor.

D.J., Frank, John, and BILLY (mature, striking) come to learn that behind the façade of Saint Mark’s sacred idealism boils a roiling cauldron of repressed sexuality, sexual perversion, and conspiracies of silence.  D.J.’s spiritual director presses him with questions about masturbation and asks him to rat out classmates who are masturbating.  Father Dis peeks in on nude seminarians while they are showering.  The four friends exchange stories of monks seduced by voluptuous temptresses and a rumor about a parish priest who fornicates with his secretary on the dining room table in his rectory.  Billy quits because he is sodomized by a monk, and the rector of Saint Mark’s runs off with Billy’s widowed mother, a chesty seductress with a divine bottom.

At Saint Monica’s Faith and other young nuns attempt to pursue lives of holiness and self-service, but similar sexual problems exist there.  Sister Perp wields a riding crop encrusted with fresh blood and chunks of flesh as her implement of intimidation and mental torture.  She attempts to control the novices through physical, psychological, and spiritual terror.  She is attracted to, and repulsed by Faith’s sensuous beauty.

Against this backdrop of moral turpitude and religious hypocrisy, D.J. meets Faith at the beginning of Fifth Class, triggering for both of them questions about celibacy and their vocations because of their forbidden love. At Frank’s invitation, she and two friends join his and D.J.’s families on the Visiting Sunday after Thanksgiving.  A wild rainstorm drives D.J. and Faith together into the third seat of the Yeats family station wagon.  The two hold hands and whisper to one another.  The rear windows of the station wagon fog up.

D.J. finds as many ways as he can to get close to Faith.  He volunteers to serve Mass for Father Fabian at Saint Monica’s; at the burial of a monk D.J. inches close enough to her to smell her sweet scents; and he repeatedly asks her to join his family on Visiting Sundays.  She enjoys the attention and his innocent touches.  On a walk in the woods one Visiting Sunday they hold hands, they embrace, they kiss each other.

When she owns up to the kiss in the confessional, Father Fabian counsels her that D.J. is a “near occasion of sin” and urges her to tell him she cannot see him anymore.  God has called her, and she must honor her sacred vocation.  Faith informs D.J. of her decision in a letter that she secrets in his clean laundry, but the stubborn D.J. refuses to give up.  D.J.’s pal John urges him to let her go and pursue one of Frank’s three sexy miniskirted sisters.  D.J. finally relents, sort of.

At the beginning of Sixth Class, a hurricane threatens the region around Saint Mark’s.  Faith and other nuns, shepherded by Sister Perp, come to the seminary to help the seminarians and monks set up an evacuation shelter in the seminary gym.  During the storm that night, D.J. impetuously embraces Faith and kisses her passionately.  She slaps him and warns, “Daniel, you must promise not to kiss me ever again, ever.”  A tactically contrite D.J. concedes.

Before the two can return to their duties in the shelter, they hear a low moan.  They discover Frank and ask him what’s going on.  He confesses that he has been raped by Father Dis.  Overwhelmed by what has taken place, Faith bolts from the scene, leaving Frank in D.J.’s arms.  Frank makes D.J. promise not to divulge who raped him, and D.J. agrees to protect Frank.

D.J. and John meet in the seminary darkroom and vow revenge.  Knowing that the predator has his sights next set on D.J., the two pals set a trap.  They tell Father Fab what has happened, and he confronts Father Dis, who denies it all and accuses Frank of coming on to him for “queer sex.”  Father Fabian goes to the abbot with what Father Dismas has done, but the abbot refuses to believe the allegations unless he can talk with the victim.  The guys console Fab that they have a backup plan for nailing Dis.

Sister Perp decides the novices should learn Latin to shield themselves against the rampant “liberalism” of the Second Vatican Council, and the rector picks D.J. as their instructor.  When D.J. goes to the convent to meet with Sister Perp about the class, a huffy Faith confronts him in the lobby, livid because she had observed him flirting with a new postulant at Vespers.  She smacks him with a mop.  The dope has no idea what’s going on.  She’s said she wants only to be “good friends,” but blurts out, “Daniel, I think I’m falling in love with you.”

According to the revenge plan, in the confessional D.J. professes to Father Dis that he’s the monk’s secret admirer, and Dis invites him for gay sex that evening.  Once D.J. is seated in Dis’s room, the priest disrobes like a stripper, admires himself in wall mirrors, and poses for the play-acting seminarian.  When D.J. gives the signal, John springs in with a 35-mm camera with a motorized drive and photographs the pedophilic priest in action.  D.J.’s fury explodes.  He clocks Dis in the eye, and spews all over him.

The closing scenes return to the Visiting Sunday in May 1968.  The action follows D.J. and Faith through D.J.’s last Sunday at Saint Mark’s.  At breakfast D.J. reaffirms that he is quitting the seminary and kids John about John’s decision to enter the monastery.  Frank behaves oddly the entire day, at one point wresting a sacred chalice away from a Eucharistic minister and chugging the consecrated wine, the Blood of Christ.  Sister Perp insists that Faith will not be allowed to attend Hamlet that night.  But Faith eludes Perp’s clutches and finds a ride.  She watches the play with D.J.’s family.

The story concludes where the opening scenes left off, just after D.J. and Faith have made love in the bell tower, at the exact same time that Frank slit his wrists with the metal crucifix on the portico of the abbey church.  D.J., Faith, and John discover the dying Frank on the steps of the church.  Despite their and Father Fab’s efforts to save him, Frank dies in Faith’s arms in a scene reminiscent of Michelangelo’s “Piéta.”  Parents race to the scene.

The timeline returns to the present-day cabin in the Rocky Mountains, where the 50-SOMETHING D.J. finishes writing his book about his days in the seminary.  D.J. and his wife Faith recall their tryst in the abbey church bell tower and flash back to Frank’s burial.  Faith throws a yellow rose into Frank’s grave and quotes Horatio’s goodbye to Hamlet, “Good night sweet prince, and flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.”  The movie ends with a joyful reunion of D.J. and Faith with the 50-SOMETHING John, now a priest, and the 70-SOMETHING Father Fabian.  In honor of Frank’s memory, D.J. and Faith’s son Danny releases hundreds of butterflies into the Rocky Mountain sky.  D.J. watches and recalls the words of W. B. Yeats,

“Think where man's glory most begins and ends,

And say my glory was I had such friends.”

Disclaimer

Visiting Sunday is a work of pure fiction. The events and characters depicted in this script are fictitious. All character names and descriptions and all situations are fictional. Any similarity to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.