priest-ridden

British  

adjective

1. dominated or governed by or excessively under the influence of priests

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Example Sentences

This phrase, in its blank and terrible irony, seemed to haunt Ireland for a long time, and even now I can’t hear it without thinking of Simon Dedalus’ dire pronouncement in A Portrait that “We are an unfortunate priest-ridden race and always were and always will be till the end of the chapter.”

From Slate

Italy boasts its 'Torquato Tasso, whose “Jerusalem Delivered,” the grand work of a great poet, marks, like a mighty monument, the age capable of finding even in a priest-ridden country, an audience amongst the lowest as well as the highest, ready to read and sing, and finally permeated with the poet’s outpourings.

From Project Gutenberg

Italy boasts its Torquato Tasso, whose "Jerusalem Delivered," the grand work of a great poet, marks, like a mighty monument, the age capable of finding even in a priest-ridden country, an audience amongst the lowest as well as the highest, ready to read and sing, and finally permeated with the poet's outpourings.

From Project Gutenberg

For any Irish person, With its depiction of a priest-ridden, repressed and mildewed version of nationalism, "Rocky Road to Dublin" may serve to remind Irish folks that, bleak as things on that dubious green island may be at the moment — and they're fairly bleak — nobody wants to go back to that.

From Salon

His story here is quite simple�a blind nobleman in a priest-ridden hill town quixotically shoulders his brother's misdeeds, earning only calumny and spite from the populace, renouncing society and going to wander, Lear-like, over the bleak table-lands with a wronged barmaid for his Cordelia, a Basque beggar for Poor Tom.

From Time Magazine Archive