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Vows: The Story of a Priest, a Nun, and Their Son

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Full disclosure: I'm a friend of Peter's and even co-authored an earlier book with him. But that's why you should trust me -- I've seen this guy develop as a writer as only a former collaborator can. I always thought he was very, very good -- but who knew he'd write the first really significant book about American Catholicism of the decade? Vows challenges the Church, no doubt. But it also demands of non-Catholics a reconsideration of how faith, faithlessness, and sex converge; how a story of a scandal is really a history of ideas; and how love and ideology clash and reshape one another.

Vows is a smart book on the surface and a brilliant book beneath, a theological treatise well-disguised as a memoir that turns out to be a thriller. His arguments are more subtle -- and more moving -- than a brief against priestly celibacy. They are also natural arguments, which is to say that they emerge for the reader from the flow of a story and not from a didactic declaration. The most stunning achievement of this book is that its intellectual depth is matched so perfectly by its narrative force.

The final chapters of the book, in which Peter's mother, a former nun, hunts down the priest who abused her, are as gripping as a crime novel even as they present original ideas about the meanings of vengeance, justice, the Church as an institution, and the Church as an body of believers, prey to all the same weaknesses and failings as the flesh.

That shouldn't limit this book to those who think about religion. It is every bit as much a story of a family bound together, uneasily, by its loyalty to an institution that rejects it. It's the story of individual lives amidst the swirl of complicated, often dangerous beliefs -- about God, of course, but also about duty and promises and freedom.

Vows is a great and important book.

Frankly, I didn't expect much from Vows. So many religion-based memoirs end up suffocating the reader with jargon and emotion. Others focus on internal struggles that lead to snooze time.

But once started on Vows, I wanted to keep going. Manseau displays a dazzling array of writing skills, moving flawlessly back and forth between his father the priest and his mother the nun, and from present to past. And Manseau has a gift of seeing the broader context of a story about ordinary people: a young man and a young woman, encouraged to "enter religion" in an era when vocations were higher than they've ever been, before or since, in the US.

Manseau reveals the truth behind the numbers. Some applicants felt truly called to the religious life; others had a little help from well-meaning mentors. And ultimately we learn that his mother's early religious history included stories of abuse that now seem all too commonplace.

A true storyteller, Manseau emphasizes the ironies of his life. By an odd series of coincidences and mistakes, his parents met in Roxbury and married. They remained loyal to the Catholic church, but their children rebelled. Manseau played video games while pretending to attend services - and grabbed a parish bulletin to take home to keep the peace.

The last third of the book presents an unsparing but often hilarious tale of Manseau's encounter with religion during his college years at University of Massachusetts. Manseau should be admired for me keeping awake for page after page of college memories: discarding an archeology major and digging for religion instead of artifacts. He avoids yet another trite "religious journey" story by focusing on the here-and-now, so that striking moments are presented with irony in the context of the mundane. I loved the story of the college student who complains to a roshi about her sore back. "Get a chair!" says the roshi, laughing.

And of course Manseau discovers Thomas Merton, a Catholic author with unique ties to Eastern religion. If any text could convert Manseau, it would be Merton's Seven Storey Mountain. Instead, Manseau ventures to a Benedictine abbey, where he discovers that monastic life is more about mops and shovels than soulful prayer. His vocation question gets settled in a hilarious episode, previously described in a New York Times Lives column.

Ultimately, we get three intricately woven story lines, just as the title promises, and each holds book-quality drama. His mother's horrendous dental treatment creates a vivid image of abuse that's especially horrifying by being so mundane. His father remains idealistic, refusing to give up his priestly status voluntarily. And we get behind-the-scenes glimpses of the abuse scandals that plagued the Boston churches, some involving priests that were seminary classmates with Peter's father.

Their children are shaped by their parents' "ex" statuses. Peter's brother initially feels alienated but later realizes there are advantages when a dad is also a priest. And Peter himself becomes strong, self-aware, independent and open-minded, not to mention an amazing writer.

It is hard to imagine Manseau writing future books that match the intensity and sheer brilliance of this one. But I hope he tries.

"Vows" is the rare book that manages to seamlessly weave personal narrative with the larger issues of the day. Indeed, it explores perhaps the biggest questions we have regarding faith, identity, loyalty, strength, grace and parenthood, and how one family has tried to bring the answers to those questions into harmony.

This is no attack from the outside. Manseau is not an iconoclast for the sake of iconoclasm. Rather he tells the story of the love of his parents and their love of the Church, loving it so much they needed to betray some of its historical dictates in the hopes of creating something even more profound.

It also portrays the complexity of the 1960's as period in which individuals were exploring opportunities to make institutional changes through thoughtful, intellectual challenges. This view is often lost among the clichés of flowerchildren and stock footage of Woodstock.

And lastly, Manseau also pulls off a neat trick, managing to be funny and irreverent without ever losing respect for his subject. Who would think that you could refer to St. Augustine as "Mr. Singing-Farts," with all the honor and esteem due a Doctor of the Church?

It is an exceptional work.

For someone as ill-informed about the Catholic Church in the United States as I am, I admittedly picked this book up somewhat naively, thinking it would be an edifying read. Little did I know that it would be an incisive, compelling page-turner with much larger implications.

This is a tale of defiance, of resistance to an institution that refused to adapt itself to the changing climate of the 60s, and one man's plight to drag it kicking and screaming into the modern world, if not return it to its original form - where celibacy among priests was optional.

The 60s history is captivating. The priest and nun met in the Roxbury area of Boston, during a tumultuous period in which race riots, fringe hippy movements, poverty, crime, alcoholism, and drugs were rife. Both were thrilled to 'bring the word to the streets', however unsavory this could be.

This book is not a manifesto against celibacy, but a very moving personal memoir about a family caught in the crosshairs of scandal, borne of resistance to the blind acceptance of tradition and of the unwillingness of the members of the Catholic administration to acknowledge its more 'unseemly' underbelly.

This book touched me because of something quite universal, yet increasingly rare: People willing to risk their livelihoods, their personal comforts, even their emotional well-being, for what they believe in. Although it is somewhat perplexing to me that the Manseaus remain proponents of an institution that won't have them or their children, perceived as "ex damnato coitu", their steadfast convictions and their son's fascinating account have earned my highest respect.

Peter Manseau's "Vows" is firstly the story of his family: the reverberating crisis caused by the decisions of his father and mother, a priest and a nun, to fall in love and get married. But through his patient, well-researched, and reflective storytelling, he also manages to employ this fascinating family history as a microscope through which to analyze the persistence of human sexuality within an ecclesiastical body that treats it like a virus. He grounds the reader in the history of the American church, as well, drawing attention to all kinds of ethnic and demographic nuances that, as a non-Catholic, I was unaware of. Manseau's book contextualizes the current turmoil facing the Church. Without preaching or editorializing, he argues persuasively, through the accumulation of passionate detail, that the Church is essentially starving itself to death by refusing the nourishment that people like his parents have to offer--and that its futile attempt to quash the lifeforce amounts, with shocking frequency, to the criminal. At the same time, Manseau doesn't whitewash his parents, portraying them as the human beings they are, and letting his readers feel some of the tension their unusual experience inflicted on his own life. It is a personal story offered generously and bravely, and told with a great deal of beauty.

It was a fitting choice that this student of archaeology decided to become a writer instead; he has the gift of detailing incidents for the laymen. Peter Manseau recounts his parents' early and current lives with amazing clarity and knowledge. Whoever deserves anonymity, the names are appropriately disregarded but the ones who require citation are properly and strongly quoted. In some parts the language evokes the bitterness felt by the parents and the writer himself. The book is so thoroughly arranged that the love story between the priest and the nun doesn't occur until approximately the middle of the book. As the title hints, the son's own experiences are contained in the writing therefore the later chapters are filled with the information. Peter Manseau is a wonderful narrator. Many times he would capture the reader's attention to the funny side of a happening no matter how subtle it is. It all arrives to a simple conclusion that the "people" of the Catholic Church are ordinary human beings just like everybody else. They have needs and wants as any other living person. Each of them possesses characteristics not different from their parishioners. Peter Manseau relates the struggle of two individuals close to him who truly believe in their religion but also fighting the law and order influenced by humans that are being imposed on their way of life. They see it as their right to do so. Since the two have a family, the children are also involved in their quandary. This is a viewpoint of the youngest son and it is an interesting perspective.

A friend of mine is the daughter of a former priest and a former nun. Her family history is what attracted me to this book...however, "Vows" is very different from what I thought it would be. As its title states, this book is a true story about the author's parents. It isn't a romantic tale of a man and woman who fall in love despite their deep religious beliefs. Actually, there's nothing particularly romantic about the story of Bill Manseau and Mary Doherty, two young people who became disenchanted with the Catholic church long before their paths eventually crossed. "Vows" details what life in the Boston Archdiocese was like a half-century ago. The book explains how Bill and Mary were both inspired to give themselves to the church, but eventually ended up wanting more out of their own lives. Neither of them abandoned the church altogether: in fact, after their marriage, the Manseaus continued to campaign for the Vatican to lift the celibacy requirement that is imposed on all priests and nuns.

The sexual abuse scandal that engulfed the Catholic church several years ago is also a major part of this book. There are some shocking revelations about how the abuse hit close to home in the Manseau family. In spite of all that, however, this book isn't an anti-Catholic or anti-religious manifesto, as one might expect it to be. The author explains the central role that religion played in his family, detailing the ways in which he both shunned and embraced religion at different points in his life. Bill and Mary, who were both treated so poorly by the church in many different ways, never let go of their faith or their desire to help reform what they consider to be serious problems in the Catholic church.

I wasn't sure what to expect from this book, but I really enjoyed reading it. Without being preachy, the author inspires readers to reflect on their own personal values, family ties, and religious beliefs. There is also a lot of interesting historical information presented in this book, and I learned a lot about the Catholic church (and about religion in general) that I never knew before.

Vows:The Story of a Priest, a Nun, and Their Son was written by the son of an unusual union: a dedicated, radical Boston-based priest whose inner soul-stirrings led him at the height of the civil rights movement, in the late sixties, to choose to marry a spirited former nun. This elegantly told, candid tale is Peter Manseau's highly successful attempt to make sense of his parent's life, faith, church, values, experiences, and deepest yearnings and feelings,as well as his own-- and he does so as a consummate storyteller.

He weaves wonderful details of the past and presnt into one seamless storyline, making of it a book that is truly hard to put down. Indeed, along the way he offers us insights into the nature, culture and history of the highly complex Catholic CHurch in twentieth century America, giving us haunting glimpses of both it's undeniable beauty, it's profound,eternal,faith-based mysteries -- and, at the same time, the inhumane, rigid legalistic, dark side of some aspects of the Church, as well.

Throughout every chapter, I found myself enthralled, intrigued, and opened to a deeper level of understanding of the culture of the Church, but also, of course, of the beautifully drawn characters he presents, including himself.For he is willing to reveal his own deep struggles with his upbringing, his unusual family, his inner battle with how to remain connected to a church that has caused his family so much pain.

It is a book,then, that raises important questions, makes one think -- deeply,for it is sombering,revealing, skillfully crafted, and a story that I think we can all (Catholic or non-Catholic) benefit from hearing. I am grateful that Peter Manseau chose to share it with us, and I can only hope that he chooses to exercise his tremendous gift for the written word through many more books to come.

Caroline Joy Adams, author of The Power to Write:Seven Keys to Discover Your Writer from Within www.CarolineJoyAdams.com

When Bill Manseau married Mary Dougherty, an ex-nun, he was still a priest. He believed his marriage, one of the earliest and most publicized of such happenings in the post-Vatican II Church, would help spur recognition that a married Catholic clergy was not only possible, but would raise the sacrament of matrimony to the holy place God intended it to be.

The Manseaus enter marriage with the zeal of apostles, working with the poor, and sharing the liturgy - a faith that will impact the lives of their children in ways they did not foresee.

In telling his parent's story, Peter Manseau has written a brilliant and illuminating book limning the impact, both positive and negative, that the Church has on the lives of its faithful.

It reminds me of those "connect-the-dots" games we played as children. As the story unfolds, we follow the Manseau family through the labyrinth of Church policy and its theology of a celibate priesthood - dots the Church would undoubtedly prefer to remain hidden.

When Manseau's mother reveals that for more than 30 years she has carried the secret of having been sexually and psychologically abused by her parish priest, the scandal of Church power and hierarchical cover-up as revealed in Vows reaches almost incendiary power.

Nevertheless, Manseau's tone remains respectful of the Church and of the yearning for belief. I found his own search for faith the most touching and powerful story of all.

Far from being some clichéd memoir about a nun and a priest leaving their respective orders to marry one another and then turning against their religion, this memoir goes so much deeper than such simplistic platitudes. It provides a compelling fascinating look into what Catholic Boston was like in the Fifties and Sixties, examining the forces that shaped Mary Doherty and Bill Manseau and which eventually led them to take vows, the forces that led them to become radicalised while ministering to the largely poor and African-American community in Roxbury (one of the cities that was struck by horrible race riots in the late Sixties, along with other tinderboxes of racial tension such as Newark, Detroit, and Los Angeles), the forces which led them to give up those vows for vows of a different sort, and the forces which continue to influence their lives, as well as the lives of their children, particularly Peter, the author.

Though Boston isn't some monolithic community, there is a huge community of Catholics there, many of them Irish like Mary Doherty's family. It was into this vibrant closeknit religious and ethnic community that Bill and Mary were born and raised in the decades just prior to Vatican II. Religion pervaded every aspect of their lives, with a clear-cut set of rules and distinctions between different groups of people. There was no gray territory in this world, yet they still managed to become influenced by the new European Catholic thinkers who were making waves in the late Fifties. Both Bill and Mary took their religious vows at the age of 17 (five years apart), at a time when the enrollment numbers of novitiate nuns and priests were at an all-time high in America. No one could have foreseen then than within the next few decades, the amount of young new postulants would slow to a trickle. Most of these hopeful novitiates entered fresh out of highschool, going straight from childhood and adolescence into religious life, as opposed to today when young people who may feel the beginning of a call are encouraged to go to college first and spend some time living a life in the secular world, so that they'll know for sure that they really want this life and vocation.

The radical changes sweeping the nation in the Sixties, coupled with the breath of fresh air that came in with Vatican II, quickly got around to Bill and Mary. Since they were already living in Roxbury, they had come to see a whole different sector of the population, people with whom they had had no prior experience. Before long they and their friends who were also priests and nuns had devoted their ministries to these poor disenfranchised people, feeling that this was the best way they could live up to their religious beliefs. In the midst of all of these changes, Bill began to feel that he needed to be married to become a full man and a full Christian. To him, the right to be married and to love a woman was a fundamental human right, a right that shouldn't be fully extended to some yet denied to others, particularly since celibate unmarried priests were the exception and not the norm for over a thousand years. He also, perhaps naïvely, truly believed that the Church would soon allow priests to marry and remain priests, the way they had up until the Middle Ages (things only changed for political reasons), and to radically rethink their teaching on celibacy. Though Mary, like many other women in that era, had left the sisterhood without similar thoughts, Bill never stopped considering himself a priest and was very active in groups of former priests and people working for the ordination of women and the right of priests to be married. Both of them also have never stopped being devout faithful believing Catholics, even after how they had been treated by the Church and many individual Catholics on account of their marriage.

In addition to the stories of his parents, there's also Peter's own story of his search for a religious faith and spirituality. By his teenage years, he had grown apart from the faith he had been raised in, as many teenagers are wont to do, and didn't want anything to do with Catholicism anymore. Things began to change when he was a student at UMass-Amherst (my own alma mater, which he attended only a few years before I did; he was there in the mid-NIneties and I went there in the early Aughts). He explored Buddhism, the writings of Thomas Merton, and a number of other faiths before taking a trial run at a nearby monastery. This simple lifestyle really appealed to him and helped him to get back in touch with his own religious roots, though in the back of his head he couldn't help wondering if he really wanted to be a monk and if it seemed so easy and alluring that he couldn't trust it. The fourth story, which ties all of the others together, is the one that swept the nation (in particular Boston) starting in 2002, that of the vast coverup of pedophilic priests who had just been moved from one diocese to another without even warning the new parishioners or punishing these priests. This story ends up hitting very close to home for the Manseau family.

Overall, it's a great book for those who are interested in American Catholicism, or Boston Catholicism in particular, how the religion has evolved over the past few decades, and the universal search for a religious or spiritual identity. Instead of falling into the trap of clichés or anti-Church rhetoric like similar books might do, this one brings up tough complex questions and issues, many of which don't have any easy or simplistic answers.