Servants

The Catholic Church is having a hard time in Czechoslovakia in the early 1980s. The communist regime threatens to crush it unless it submits to strict control and accepts restrictions on freedom of belief and expression. The clergy is divided into the regime-critical “catacomb church”, which maintains contact with the Vatican and Western media, and the “ecclesiastical hierarchy” which cooperates with those in power and is represented by the state-sponsored priests’ association Pacem in Terris that existed in the ČSSR from 1971 to 1989. This is the context in which young seminarians Michal and Juraj have to decide whether to remain faithful to their vocation and idealism or to bow to pressure from the secret police.