1 9 8 0 (Australia)
13 x 60 minute episodes
This drama series from the Australian ABC was filmed in Sydney and involved priests in inner-city suburbia.
Father Jack Menotti (Ivar Kants) was an idealistic, Left-leaning and mildly rebellious young Catholic priest who had spent two years in America doing a post-graduate course in social work and now had been thrust into doing nothing more than routine duties in a suburban parish.
His constant adversary was Monsignor Donnelly (Peter Gwynne), an irascible man so steeped in traditional views that he regarded the younger priest’s ideas as nothing more than “psychiatric clap-trap”.
Reluctantly, Menotti had to do what he was told, but some of the heated verbal exchanges between the two men of the cloth were some of the show’s highlights.
Father Jack Menotti
Ivar Kants
Monsignor Donnelly
Peter Gwynne