Snatched from th delight of rushing puberty just as he is thrown into the willing affection of the loveliest girl in school, fourteen-year-old Gerald Burke is spirited off to a seminary by a zealous mother and a persuasive monk eager to take a fresh vocational prize. Young Jerry is also led to believe that his father, whom he idolized as a child, has abandoned his family to the great depression of the 1930's Eleven years later, when he takes his first asssignment as an ordained priest, he has lost all family to death or estrangement. In his isolation a temporary pastor of a small country church and grammar school, he is beset with reawakened longings for the girl of his frustrated adolescence and the forbidden attraction of a nun with whom he must work. His distraction results in deep feelings of guilt, ill-advised innovations in worship, confusion within his congregation -- and the wrath of his Church. Too late he realizes the nature of his vocational impressment -- that he has been shanghaied into the vow of celibacy