The initiative is quite unusual: the former singer of a boy band that was popular in the 1990s converted to Catholicism and has just made a documentary glorifying the Sacred Heart. The film, which has just been released in French cinemas, has been met with national censorship, with advertising agencies and local authorities refusing to screen it on the grounds of alleged “violations of secularism.” Despite—or because of—this, it has been a hit with audiences.
The career of Steven Gunnell, the son of a British rocker living in France, has had many twists and turns. In the 1990s, he shared the stage with three other young men in the rock band Alliage, well known to teenage girls, which enjoyed some significant success on the French pop scene.
After the band split up in the early 2000s, Steven Gunnell went through a difficult period and sank into alcoholism. His conversion to Catholicism helped him recover, and he decided to put his artistic career at the service of his faith. After writing and performing Catholic-inspired music, he turned his attention to making a documentary film entitled Sacré-Cœur: son règne n’aura pas de fin (Sacred Heart: His Reign Will Have No End), in which he explores devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus.
This particular devotion has a very French history.
Three hundred and fifty years ago, in 1675, a Visitation nun from Burgundy, Marguerite-Marie Alacoque, was struck by visions of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, asking her to work for the spread of his devotion. In 1689, he asked Marguerite-Marie to go to King Louis XIV and ask him to consecrate France to his Sacred Heart and to add its image to the kingdom’s banners. The request went unheeded, but a little over a century later, the Sacred Heart was adopted as an emblem by counter-revolutionaries committed to defending their king and their faith during the Reign of Terror in 1793. Another request of this kind was made to President Raymond Poincaré during the First World War by another nun, Claire Ferchaud—again to no avail. The basilica dedicated to the Sacred Heart has dominated Paris for 150 years and is one of the most visited places in the capital.
Gunnell’s film, made with his wife Sabrina, tells the story of this devotion to the Sacred Heart, from the apparitions of Saint Marguerite-Marie to the present day, alternating between historical narrative, spiritual reflections on the love of Christ, and testimonies from people converted by his Sacred Heart.
Upon its release, the documentary was met with a powerful wave of hostility. Mediatransports, the advertising agency for the RATP (Paris transport authority) and the SNCF (national railway company), refused to run any promotional posters for the film, judging it too “confessional and proselytising” and therefore “incompatible with the principle of public service neutrality.” This is not the first time that Mediatransports has censored subjects related to Christian identity. In 2015, the agency refused a poster campaign for a concert on the grounds that it was organised “for the benefit of Eastern Christians,” for the same reasons. The neutrality of public service is a convenient excuse, since every year the corridors of the Paris metro are plastered with campaigns for Islamic charities or food advertisements targeting Muslims during Ramadan.
Hubert de Torcy, director of the SAJE Distribution group, which manages the film’s distribution, believes Mediatransports’ decision is unfair: “The subject of the film is part of French history and French culture,” he explained to Le Figaro. Speaking on Europe 1, director Steven Gunnell pointed out the absurdity of tolerating posters for ostensibly anti-Christian films such as The Nun, The Exorcist, and The Conjuring in public spaces, but rejecting Sacré-Cœur.
Steven James Gunnell témoigne après l’interdiction de son film «Sacré Coeur» : «J’ai pété un câble hier soir, je ne supporte plus qu’on censure le christianisme en France», dans #MorandiniLive pic.twitter.com/BT7aIpggTX
— CNEWS (@CNEWS) October 23, 2025
Sacré-Cœur has many detractors. The progressive newspaper La Croix, although officially Catholic and distributed in many parishes and religious communities, even published an op-ed condemning the film, which is accused of “reinforcing the links between Catholicism and the far right.” The accusation is aimed at conservative Catholic billionaire Vincent Bolloré, owner of the CNews channel, who helped finance the film. “This is not about criticising a film, but about showing what its supporters say about it,” reads the collective op-ed published by La Croix, which is fond of this type of stigmatisation.
The film was released on October 1st in 150 theatres across France—just over one per department—but without any national advertising coverage.
The offensive also spread to the very places where it was being shown, with some municipalities simply refusing to allow the film to be screened in their cinemas.
One case in particular made headlines—that of Marseille. The film was to be screened at the Château de la Buzine—an iconic location, as it is the castle immortalised by Provençal writer and filmmaker Marcel Pagnol in his work Le Château de ma mère (My Mother’s Castle), which has since become a cultural centre—but was pulled from the programme by Socialist mayor Benoît Payan just one hour before it was due to be shown, on the grounds that it was “an attack on secularism,” following a report by a city official. “The decision not to hold this screening in a municipal facility is in strict accordance with the law. A public facility cannot host screenings that, by their nature and content, are of a religious nature,” the municipality explained in a press release.
Several centre and right-wing elected officials protested the decision. ”After blacklisting Jews, now it’s Catholics!” said the president of the region, Renaud Muselier, indignantly. Franck Allisio, the National Rally candidate for the upcoming municipal elections in Marseille, denounced the “Christianophobia” at work in Marseille.
Together with the director, conservative senator Stéphane Ravier, a close associate of Marion Maréchal, filed an urgent administrative appeal to lift the screening ban, denouncing “the false pretence of selective secularism.” The court ruled in their favour, finding that the mayor’s decision “constituted a serious and manifestly illegal violation of freedom of expression, freedom of artistic creation, and freedom of artistic distribution.” The distribution of a film of a Christian nature does not in any way constitute a violation of secularism.
Making amends, the socialist mayor finally picked up the phone to call the director, even promising to attend a screening of the film. As always in such cases, censorship only served to strengthen the motivation of viewers. The film is entering its fifth week in theatres and is about to pass the 300,000 viewer mark.