Director Sinéad O’Shea returns to Navan, the town in Ireland where she grew up, to investigate the overwhelming power of the Catholic church, and the emotional and physical brutality of its methods for dealing with "sinners' who stray from strictly circumscribed religious and social norms.

O’Shea focuses her lens on the fate of countless women who fell victim to the Catholic church’s system for dealing with young women who became pregnant out of wedlock, and the babies they brought into the world. Through chicanery and especially shame, Navan's revered local priest routinely spirited pregnant women–most of them teenagers–off to “mother and baby homes,” with the complicity of their parents. There, nuns unleashed a torrent of abuse and punishment that persisted even in the delivery room. In many instances, the nuns and priests lied, telling the new mothers their babies had not survived. Some of the babies were then adopted out to families, while others had, indeed, died, their remains to be discovered only years later.

O’Shea also follows those who resist, including a mother who manages to track down and reclaim her baby, and a couple who offer a safe haven for unmarried women who become pregnant. She finds resistance in a child, a nine-year-old boy, who stands up against corporal punishment in school.

The abuses of unmarried mothers that O’Shea documents continued through the early 1990s, with abortion only legalized in Ireland four years ago. In this post-Roe v. Wade era, PRAY FOR OUR SINNERS offers a portrait of the not-so-distant past, suddenly relevant for our time.