The Collar.

THE COLLAR By Jonathan Englert (Houghton Mifflin, 2006)

Journalist Jonathan Englert spent a year inside Sacred Heart School of Theology, a Milwaukee-area institution that specializes in training "second-career" priests. Englert, whose access to two other seminaries was revoked before he was welcomed as a fly on the wall at Sacred Heart, offers a compelling and candid look at the American priesthood of the 21st century.

The aspirants on whom Englert focuses are no cardboard characters. They include a divorced father, a former Marine wracked by attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, a blind violinist torn between the altar and marriage, and a widowed granddad. Together they wrestle with everything from class projects to the demands of celibacy.

A convert to Catholicism, Englert neither aimed to be critical of the church, nor, as he writes, to "set about fashioning a saccharine vocation story. I believe that a committed priest can do an extraordinary amount of good in the world. But I also know that a vocation, as is the case of all religious experience, is rooted in the reality of the human condition and often emerges from a jagging, uneven road."

The Collar casts a bright beam on that rutted road. Englert's book succeeds because it portrays the day-to-day struggles, doubts, and small triumphs of its main characters, giving readers an authentic view of modern seminary life. And the book has a quiet urgency to it, since the United States has some 25 percent fewer priests than it did in 1965 despite a growth in the Catholic population by at least 30 percent.

Predictably the seminarians' lives are littered with the minutiae of modern life, and at times Englert gets bogged down in recounting the prosaic details. Still, this is a book well worth reading and maybe even keeping alongside the steady stream of news stories about sex-abuse scandals and Vatican intrigue. The priestly life is far more than the headlines, and Englert helps show how and why that is so.