The story of Fr. Casimir "Jake" Jakubowski, displaced from his comfortable parish in Michigan and thrown into an impoverished New Mexican village. The liberal priest's life becomes a mirage as a politically driven bishop, a dysfunctional pastor, a flimflam Texan filmmaker, and a fundamentalist commune collide with the old Spanish ways of rural New Mexico. Father Jake helps solve a mystery of a fellow priest against the backdrop of contemporary crisis in the Catholic Church, a satanic mass, and the reenactment of the Civil War Battle of Glorieta in New Mexico.