The movie begins with the following premise: Handsome young Father Michael Pace (Tom Berenger) is an assistant priest at St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York. His father, Carlo Pace (Dane Clark), is the godfather of the New York Mafia. The movie opens with Michael's sister, Zena (Anne Twomey) catching her husband with his mistress and shooting him. She's a pretty good shot. The first shot castrates him, the second one kills him. Then she goes to Father Michael to confess her sin.

The sacrament of confession is handled throughout this movie as a cheap gimmick, without the slightest evidence that any of the characters or filmmakers understand how it works. But never mind. I mention that the sister goes to her brother to make a confession because the movie is inept at storytelling. Unless you are very clever or perhaps psychic, you will actually not catch on until late in the movie that Father Michael is even related to Don Carlo or to Zena. The movie isn't keeping it a secret; it's simply so slipshod that this crucial information is not clearly supplied.

The husband's mistress is named Angela (Daphne Zuniga). After she escapes from the bloodbath of revenge, she finds herself sheltered and comforted by none other than Father Michael, who believes her story that she is a simple Mexican girl who got into some very deep water.

Zuniga's Mexican accent is so unbelievably bad it wouldn't even qualify for a Taco Bell ad. No one could possibly believe she is really a Mexican - except perhaps in this movie, which is so witless that you're inclined to give the accent the benefit of the doubt. (The linguistic depths of the movie are murky indeed; Don Carlo pronounces his name, Pace, to sound like "pa-chay," but young Michael makes it rhyme with "race." Thus, of course, at a crucial moment a character does not realize they are related.)

Michael and Angela fall in love, after Michael moves her into his bachelor quarters inside St. Patrick's Cathedral. You might ask how a priest could live with a woman inside a cathedral without being noticed, but the cathedral seems to be severely understaffed, and the only other priest in view is genial old Father Freddie (Paul Dooley), who stutters a lot and waxes philosophical. In order to handle the tricky challenge of a love scene between the priest and the young woman, the writer-director, Donald P. Bellisario, gives us an extended erotic sequence and then reveals it was only a dream. Of course, after the "dream," both characters subsequently change in their behavior toward each other as if they had really made love, the movie being so dishonest that it eats its cake and has it, too.

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