GOD AND MAN IN LIVERPOOL

By RICHARD CORLISS

FATHER GREG (LINUS ROACHE), the young priest at a Catholic parish in Liverpool, is handsome, theologically conservative--and gay. His boss, Father Matthew (Tom Wilkinson), spouts socialist dogma and has sex with his live-in housekeeper. The husband of the parish's hardest-working volunteer forces sex on their daughter. The local bishop is a ward heeler in a cassock.

Priest, then, is no Going My Way. And Good Friday was perhaps not the ideal day for Miramax Films to schedule Priest for wide release. Small wonder that a few of the faithful were miffed. The Catholic League threatened a boycott of Miramax's owner, the Walt Disney Co., before Miramax moved the date back. Disney hardly needs the aggravation; last week it told Miramax that the studio could not distribute Kids, a scalding and graphic film about an HIV-positive teen. If Kids receives a proscriptive nc-17 rating, Miramax may be obliged to sell the film (with its hefty $3.5 million price tag) to another distributor.

Priest, directed by Antonia Bird, is sensational only in its content. At heart it is a TV drama with a one-track mind; Jimmy McGovern's script has no fewer than four scenes in which someone intrudes on a couple's sexual intimacy. Bird cues every emotion with spell-it-out reaction shots and a soupy sound track. What movie dares use You'll Never Walk Alone with no irony? Priest does, which is one reason why it leaves fat, hot tears on many spectators' faces. The film delivers on its promise to edify at any cost.

For many modern Catholics, the question of a gay clergy inspires a big shrug. Why shouldn't homosexuals (and women) be priests? These days, they are among the few who want to be. The real issue, blithely dodged in this movie, is the Catholic sin of giving scandal. A priest is, after all, Christ's salesman and stand-in. He need not be infallible--since he is human and conceived in sin-but he'd damn well better be discreet. So it is one thing for old Matthew to keep a woman quietly in the rectory; it is another for young Greg to go cruising in a gay bar near his parish. Or surrender to rapture on a public beach. Or have oral sex in a car on the street. Poor Greg: he may not be damned, but he surely is dense.

If Greg were to come to this confessor, his penance would be 10 Hail Marys and an I.Q. test. As for Priest, it would be made to sit in sackcloth and ashes at the church door as a cautionary example to all filmmakers who truckle to noble sentiment.