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

by Peter Manseau

Book Overview

Vows is a compelling story of one family's unshakable faith that to be called is to serve, however high the cost may be. Peter Manseau's riveting evocation of his parents' parallel childhoods, their... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0743249070
• Release Date: October 2005
• Publisher: Free Press
• Length: 400 Pages
• Weight: 1.39 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.0" x 1.3" x 6.3"

Customer Reviews

A memoir that's hard to forget

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 advantag

Insight

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.

Exceptional

"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.

Mesmerizing memoir of a family unwanted

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.

Smart on the Surface, Brilliant Beneath

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.