05:36 PM MST on Friday, March 5, 2004

By Stephanie Innes
© 2004 Arizona Daily Star

In his new novel, "The Priestly Sins," the Rev. Andrew Greeley tells the fictional story of Father Herman Hoffman who witnesses another priest raping a child but Hoffman is punished with a sentence to a mental institution for reporting it.

The book is fiction, but Greeley based Hoffman's story on truth — a truth that underscores what is still going wrong in the Catholic Church, Greeley said in an interview at his Tucson home Friday morning.

Greeley, who will give a public talk about the priesthood at the East Side Our Mother of Sorrows Church on Sunday afternoon, remains skeptical that serious management problems within the American Catholic Church have been rectified, in spite of efforts by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops to eradicate sexual abuse by clergy.

The bishops themselves are the problems, stressed Greeley, speaking exactly one week after the national bishops' conference released two long-anticipated studies on the scope of clergy abuse against children.

"If the church had been responsive 20 years ago, none of this would have happened," Greeley said, speaking of the abuse crisis that came to light in 2002. "The bishops who did this need to be replaced. There is zero tolerance for abusive priests, but that doesn't apply to the bishops."

While the statistical study on Catholic clergy abuse released last week based on data gathered by the John Jay School of Criminal Justice in New York garnered the most attention, Greeley said it was the second study, released by the National Review Board, that was more illuminating and revealing.

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