BOOK REVIEW : An Anticlimactic Tale of Vatican Intrigue : ACTS OF CONTRITION <i> by John Cooney</i> ; Crown; $20, 359 pages

Think of “Acts of Contrition” as a police procedural in which the chiefs wear red hats. Having learned more than enough about the inner workings of the Catholic Church in the course of researching “The American Pope” (his biography of Cardinal Spellman) John Cooney has used the overflow for a novel of intrigue and suspense set in the Vatican, New York and Washington.

His pivotal character is Patrick Hogan, a monsignor with an enormously successful TV interview program, a man “with the genial, reassuring smile Bing Crosby wore when playing a priest in old movies,” a telegenic cleric who has parlayed rugged good looks and a keen intelligence into celebrity.

Although Hogan’s program is nominally religious, the title “Life Has Meaning” offers him considerable scope. Heads of state vie with movie stars, writers and popular performers for air time. After a heart-to-heart chat with the guest of the hour, Hogan roams the studio audience with microphone in hand, inviting questions, commenting, joking, dispensing lashings of warmth and compassion. The predominantly female audience mobs him after every show.

Imagine Phil Donahue in a turned collar; Johnny Carson with a full head of copper hair and square, dimpled chin; Barbara Walters signing off with a moral message. In comparison to the usual run of TV evangelists, the monsignor is a class act, and he’s enough of a showman to consider that a compliment.

The church not only smiles upon his activities, but is so impressed with his ability that Patrick Hogan is about to become a bishop. Before that can happen, however, certain formalities must be observed. Progressive as the Church is, a bishopric is not an Emmy.

All systems for the elevation are apparently go when an anonymous letter alluding to a dark secret in Hogan’s past reaches the Vatican. The note is terse, saying only that Hogan must never be made a bishop because he was involved in a mortal sin in Washington on March 20, 1972.

At that time, Hogan was a student; one of three outstanding classmates at Gethsemane Seminary selected to represent the school at an anti-war march. Of those three, one, Damian Carter, has gone underground after a brief but remarkable career as a political radical; another, William Witten, has mysteriously vanished--presumed to have committed suicide.

Another Gethsemane alumnus, Father Kevin Kelly, is summoned to investigate Hogan’s past, a role for which he is eminently well qualified. A Vietnam veteran who entered the priesthood after a career as a Green Beret, Kelly is discreet, well-connected in high places and at home in a world few clergymen know.

The ensuing inquiry introduces us to a variety of Church figures in and out of the Vatican, proving that the hierarchy contains a far broader sampling of humanity than an outsider might suppose.

If the cardinal virtues of prudence, justice, temperance and fortitude seem somewhat underrepresented by the large cast of clergy and laymen, the capital sins of pride, covetousness, lust, anger, gluttony, envy and sloth have always made for livelier reading.

Familiar with church protocol and thoroughly acquainted with the various types drawn, for one reason or another, to the Mother Church, Cooney is clearly on firm ground even when his personalities seem little more than human compendia of the traits he’s lauding or excoriating.

In the book, we learn the facts about the other two leading members of the Gethsemane class as well; stories considerably more melodramatic than Hogan’s own secret.

Although the search for the truth about Patrick Hogan develops considerable momentum, the resolution is not only predictable but also contrived; the revelation of the accusation against the monsignor arriving so late that it appears as an anticlimax. Encouraged to speculate continuously for 336 pages out of 359, few readers will fail to arrive at their own conclusions well ahead of the author’s leisurely schedule.

Next: Carolyn See reviews “Daughters of Memory” by Janice Arnold (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill).