By Maria Sudekum Fisher
The Associated Press

In The Priestly Sins, Andrew M. Greeley, author, sociologist and Catholic priest, weighs in on the clergy sex abuse scandal in the Roman Catholic Church with a novel about one priest's encounter with that horror.

The Rev. Herman Hoffman is just getting started as a priest in a rural parish in the Midwest. He's a "farm boy six weeks into his first assignment" when he hears a child screaming from another priest's quarters. Hoffman races in, pulls the priest off the boy and warns other children to stay away from the twisted older man.

Hoffman reports the incident to the church hierarchy, which "rewards" him with threats against his job and a six-month stay in a psychiatric clinic. He's also accused of being gay. But, typical for a Greeley novel, Hoffman is heterosexual and spent much of his pre-seminary time courting and winning a beautiful woman.

The novel opens with a court hearing that takes place several decades after the abuse that Hoffman witnessed. But the story backtracks to Hoffman's life as the son of Russian-German immigrants in the American Midwest.

Greeley embroiders Hoffman's idyllic family life on the farm with discussions about his superior intellect, integrity and humility.

"I may have a Ph.D. and teach at a university. I may be able to speak two languages rather fluently. I may read The New York Times every day and listen to the Lehrer Report every evening. I may play the piano by ear and sight-read notes for choir music. Yet I have never been east of Chicago or west of Denver, south of Little Rock or north of St. Paul. I am the son of a farmer and a farmer at heart myself."

Greeley tries to draw a portrait of a hero within the church, a priest who loves children and his job and wants only to do his best for his parishioners. But what he ends up with is a paragon, someone too perfect to believe in. Greeley does a better job at depicting the wide variety of players in the church, where reasonable people excel alongside the pedophiles and psychotics.

Priestly Sins shows how priests were able to continue molesting children while the church hushed up victims' families and shuttled the offenders from parish to parish. But it fails to provide an effective portrait of a believable character caught up in the mess.

The book leaves the impression that Greeley, who teaches at the University of Chicago and the University of Arizona, dashed off his take on the subject without giving it the thought and care it deserved.