Novelists usually describe the Church's impact on childhood to explain the importance of adult faith. [In The Cardinal Sins] Father Greeley sins by omission, therefore, in beginning with the adolescence of his main characters. Fortunately, the author resists the temptation to make them allegorical figures. Instead, he dramatizes through their lives the course of postwar American Catholicism. Scholar-priest Kevin Brennan infrequently comforts his friends as he tells what he knows of them: fellow seminarian Patrick Cardinal Donohue, in whom zeal vies with concupiscence; rich "cousin" Maureen Cunningham, whose prophetic perception of others doesn't save her; and old flame Ellen Foley, who survives tragedy and bitterness…. If the story is "not history, biography, or (perhaps sadly) autobiography," it is partly popular journalism, ecclesiastical gossip, and (perhaps regrettably) apologia. People, not structure, sustain the Church—and this certain best-seller.

Hugh M. Crane, in a review of "The Cardinal Sins," in...