Fighting Irish

By Mayo Mohs

FATHER'S DAY by Eugene Kennedy Doubleday; 488 pages; $13.95

THE CARDINAL SINS by Andrew M. Greeley Warner; 350 pages; $12.95

During the late 1960s--the most turbulent years of America's Roman Catholic Church--few commentators were quoted more often than two priests, Fathers Eugene Kennedy and Andrew Greeley. Kennedy has since dropped his clerical title and is happily married. Greeley, a defender of both sensuality and celibacy, has kept his Roman collar, and his insider's anger at his church.

Now both men have published major novels. Kennedy's crept in like Chicago fog; Greeley's was announced with a Mayor Daley-style fanfare: a $75,000 promotion budget that included a cassette of Greeley explaining his work. The quality of the two novels varies in inverse proportion to their publicity.

Father's Day centers on two strong Irishmen: P.B. Kinsella, a self-made Chicago construction magnate, and his son Tom, a priest who has become president of Notre Dame. Some brilliant flashbacks explore the genesis of P.B.'s touchdown philosophy, his initiation into Chicago politics, his brush with racketeering. Others chart Tom's rise to power at the university and follow him through an ardent friendship with an actress named Maria Moore.

The crescendo occurs on a dizzying weekend when both Notre Dame and the family empire seem ready to come apart. The campus is erupting in a freakish religious spectacle. A Vatican visitor offers Father Kinsella the Archdiocese of Chicago--just as Maria asks for clarification of her role in Kinsella's life. Meanwhile, a federal prosecutor tries to build political capital out of an investigation of P.B.'s firm. Kennedy ties just the right knots in these tangled threads, while rounding out most of his cast with a sure hand. P.B., his best creation, is solid brick, a man who strikes elaborate deals with God and, in a curiously touching way, keeps them.

The Cardinal Sins is about as good a novel as it is a pun. The lives of its four leading characters, Greeley explains in a foreword, are shaded by one or more of the traditional seven cardinal sins (pride, covetousness, lust, anger, gluttony, envy and sloth). Greeley follows Patrick Donahue, his friend Kevin Brennan, and the two women in their lives, Ellen Foley and Maureen Cunningham, from a pre-seminary adolescent summer to the slopes of middle age. As a priest, Kevin is a controversial writer and social scientist who bears an unflattering resemblance to the author. Donahue, clearly more fictional, is a cleric whose path through the hierarchy to Cardinal glides steadily up despite a series of brutal sexual encounters.

Greeley tracks the men to the 1978 papal elections, a maneuver that allows him to ransack his own nonfiction book, The Making of the Popes, 1978, and to use Pope John Paul II in a cameo role, praying for Cardinal Donahue's dying mistress. Along the way there are other, even less beguiling vignettes: in one scene Greeley portrays "a disciple of the Berrigans'," proclaiming that "we will make bombs, find guns; we will burn, trash and destroy." That is not what the Berrigans have ever preached, as Greeley well knows. But it is a symptom of the rage that runs through the novel. Kennedy's fighting Irish brawl, then hug and forgive. Greeley tries to allow his to do the same, but while the ritual words are pronounced, the absolution never quite seems to come. --By Mayo Mohs

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