Within South Slavic literature, more serious research of the priest character, i.e. spiritual person, can be traced from the era of realism. Because of the complexity of the calling itself and the social positioning, combined with the permanent tension between religion and duty, collective and personal, secular and sacral, the priest character is a permanent, but less researched subject. In literature, such character has its own typological value and offers interesting research experience. This dissertation encompasses literary works from Croatian and Slovenian literature where such personality emerges from the period of realism. Its functional occurrence and depiction is most taunting in the texts of a wider understood modernism of the 20th century. The main aim of this dissertation is to contribute to the understanding of this specific character through interpretation and critical account of literature works containing figures of priests, using the comparative retrospect of certain works from Croatian and Slovenian literature. This was achieved by depiction of the figure within the light of contemporary (considering the appropriate texts) literature theories, defining the function of the priest character in the researched works, exemplification of analogies of compared texts as well as account of multiple appropriateness of choice of a spiritual person being the main theme in literature works. This dissertation also reveals a scope of problems identified in the researched texts: contemporary account of historic events, conflicts between spiritual and physical, the relation between ideology and an individual, the celibate issue, faith and its role in the human existence, the relationship between religion and universal contradictions and doubts. By establishing the relation between such literature characters with the real priests in our contemporary lives, the need to understand their general and symbolic function in terms of tragic alienation of a contemporary human, emerges.