Money

The pursuit of money represents the modern Catholic Church’s obsession with materialism and its drift away from the fundamental teachings of Christ. Although Joe as a priest wants to commit his life to prayer, the pursuit of the spiritual, and the development of his soul as a manifestation of his love of God, he must deal every day with the pressures of money. As a young priest he naively refuses to use the liturgy of the Mass to nag his parishioners for donations, but he learns over time that money is an essential element of the Church. Until he is reassigned to a pastoral posting in the slums of Minneapolis, money distracts Joe from his urgent sense of his true mission of the priesthood.

War

Set largely in 1968 against the backdrop of the increasingly unpopular American involvement in the Vietnam War, war represents the modern...