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	Son Shares Story of Priest and Nun Parents In His Memoir, Author Peter Manseau Chronicles the Complex Lives of His Parents, a Former Nun and an Excommunicated Priest. Read an Excerpt MSNBC [Boston MA] Downloaded October 14, 2005 In the early 1960s, the Catholic church underwent a huge change. The Second Vatican Council issued in a new era of modernization for the church, and many priests and nuns began to leave, frustrated that the Vatican continued to require that they remain celibate. From 1965 to 2000, the number of priests in the U.S. dropped 30 percent, the number of nuns, 54 percent. Many of those who left, married. Peter Manseau is the son of a former priest and nun. His new book, "Vows," tells the story of his parents' decision to join the religious life, their later decision to leave it, and the consequences that decision had on their family. Manseau was invited to discuss the book on "Today." Here's an excerpt. My parents don't remember their earliest conversation. What was said when, who spoke first and why: these are details almost forty years gone. All my father can tell me is that he met my mother in his storefront ministry center in Roxbury late in the spring of 1968. A year before, he had rented an abandoned funeral home on Shawmut Avenue, propped open the doors to thin the stench of flowers and embalming fluid, and hung a sign out front declaring that all were welcome. A few months later, someone threw a metal trash can through the plate-glass window beside the entrance. He covered the hole and cleaned up as best he could, but there was no end to the mess that had been made. When my father describes the room in which he met my mother, he is always sure to mention the biblical murals that decorated the walls. I suppose he likes the image of the two of them surrounded by life-size portraits of prophets and saints, but my mind is drawn instead to all that stubborn glass, to tiny slivers working their way deep into the shag carpet, catching light whenever the overhead fluorescents were on. Wednesday evenings, Dad tells me, he would walk down Fort Hill from the All Saints rectory and preach in his storefront to whomever would listen. Sometimes he drew a crowd that filled five rows of folding chairs: families from the Lenox Street housing projects, drunks from Blue Hill Avenue, a handful of sisters from the convent nearby. One night the woman who would be my mother was among them. They all sat together with the soles of their shoes crunching the carpet below; singing, clapping, praying in a building that still wore scars from the previous summer, the season when the city burned. That's how I imagine the scene of my parents' meeting, as a series of contrasts and contradictions. Standing between a cardboard-patched window and scripture-painted walls, half-buried shards twinkling like stars beneath them, they made their introductions in the middle of a storefront with nothing to sell. He was a Catholic priest wearing a white plastic collar like a lock around his neck. She was a nun in a virgin's black veil. What did they say? Too much has happened since then; it's no surprise they can't remember the simple greeting that started it all. Whatever the words might have been, I know they were spoken in a place full of the kind of faith with which I was raised, the kind of faith that knows how close hope and pain are to moments of possibility; the kind that sees something holy in that broken glass at their feet, splinters of grace that cut as well as shine. Via Crucis The sculpture in the corner is dark, the color of wet earth. Rising three feet or so above its pedestal, it could be the model of a tower or a knot-gnarled tree. In fact, it is a tangle of bodies, a doll-scale depiction of a scene usually associated with souls in eternal torment: bare arms, legs, and torsos wrapped around one another, grabbing and kicking as if being pulled from below; pained faces staring out in every direction. From a distance, the piece looks almost accidental, protuberances jutting out here and there, no logic to its shape. Only on closer inspection can you see the intersecting wooden beams, and the man nailed to them, buried under the odd bulk of the hardened clay. The bodies wind around a tilted crucifix like ribbons on a maypole fallen down. It's difficult to tell where one ends and the next begins. Jesus' dead hand rests on a muscular shoulder. A veiled woman writhes past his forearm, revealing her breasts. The bodies spiral upward from the cross of death at the base of the sculpture to another cross, much smaller, at the top, held by communal effort. Not by a particular body or by many, but as one. That's the message. The medium, however, is far more messy: up close the sculpture resembles nothing so much as a game of Twister played on the canvas of a late gothic crucifixion. Right hand, red. A fumbling group-grope of revelation. If it's a sacrilege, it's a well-placed one. Via Crucis, the Way of the Cross, stands in a dim hallway of the Archbishop's Residence in Brighton, Massachusetts, on the first floor of what was until recently one of the most prestigious addresses in the Roman Catholic Church, former home to the highest-ranking prelate in America. The sculpture doesn't at all match the decor of the manse, but still, it's a fitting spot. For all its physicality, its erotic detail, the tangle of bodies is meant to suggest the church itself; the cumulative experience of those whose lives have rested on a single sacrifice, building up through the centuries to a mountain of human endeavor that one day will reach its reward. Yet whatever the artwork is supposed to represent, when I stood in the hallway in which it resides, it seemed unlikely many others had viewed the sculpture of late. A skin of dust covered the pedestal; a faded plaque was all that displayed the artist's name. Along with the usual effects of age and neglect, the piece was rather difficult to see. The whole house —quiet, empty, smelling of freshly vacuumed carpet — was cast in shadows, as if half the lightbulbs had burned out at once, or, more likely, as if they were keeping an eye on the electric bill, trying to save a nickel or two wherever they could. This was the spring of 2003. The Archdiocese of Boston had by then paid over $50 million in settlements to victims of sexual abuse by its clergy. They could barely afford what little light was left. My father had an appointment that day to meet with the archdiocese's "Interim Apostolic Administrator," Bishop Richard G. Lennon, acting man-in-charge after Cardinal Bernard F. Law resigned in disgrace for his role in the abuse scandal. Law had insisted for months he knew nothing of the dangerous histories of the men involved. Then came the documents: his name, his blessing, on transfer after transfer, moving known pedophiles to unsuspecting parishes, sending wolves to tend his flock. It all resulted in a promotion for Lennon, but now he had the unenviable job of cleaning up the mess. I had gone along with Dad that day to offer moral support. With nothing but bad news coming out of the Archbishop's Residence lately, he had been understandably anxious about the meeting. Yet it seemed possible at the time that Bishop Lennon agreed to speak with Dad more as a diversion than anything else. Compared with the scandal and the financial crisis it caused, my father should not have presented a pressing matter from the church's point of view. Dad's errand was merely to find out whether the Catholic hierarchy still considered him a priest. He had been ordained by the Archdiocese of Boston some forty years before. Eight years later he had married my mother, and had been excommunicated for refusing to resign his priestly status. Somewhere along the way, a change in canon law had reduced his penalty from excommunication to censure, and now, at sixty-seven, he was considering getting right with his church. After thirty-four years as a devoted if disobedient Catholic married to the same, my father thought it might be time to have his union with my mother recognized by Rome. The church would do no such thing, however, if Dad remained unwilling to bend to its will on the question of his priesthood, his "clerical state." In other words, in order to have the primary relationship of his life affirmed by the church he loved, he would have to give up his primary identity within it. It's a kind of sacramental blackmail: not quite damned if you do, damned if you don't, but grace, authority, and even God are at stake if you take this kind of thing seriously. And Dad does. So he wanted to know where he stood, and what would be involved in being laicized, or, as the process is also called, "dispensed," "regularized," "reduced." The church has no shortage of terms for spiritual debasement. We were sitting in the worn chairs of a dimly lit waiting area. Dad leaned forward, sat back, crossed and uncrossed his legs, trying to adjust, to settle into his chair and just wait patiently for the bishop to appear. At the far end of the hall, blue light shone from the windows of a small chapel: blue light on blue carpet, blue light on marble tabletops, blue light on an oak brown door. "We used to come up here two at a time, once a week," Dad said. "Two seminarians would go into that chapel to help Cardinal Cushing with his radio broadcast. He'd intone the rosary into his microphone and it was our job to provide the responses. Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee, he'd say, and we'd answer, Holy Mary, Mother of God ... That was the whole show. People actually listened." Dad straightened his glasses, glancing nervously around the hallway. Portraits of cardinals past stared down at us from the opposite wall. Directly in front of us was Richard J. Cushing, Archbishop of Boston from 1944 to 1970. Kennedy's cardinal — he delivered the younger man's eulogy — and yet as late as the 1950s, Cushing wondered why on earth Catholics would choose to attend a place like Harvard when there were more than enough seats at Catholic colleges to go around. The last towering figure of the insular, immigrant Catholicism in which my parents were raised, his portrait had a square chin, a large, severe nose, and deep vertical creases cut in his face. Even in his lush red cloak and matching three-cornered cardinal's hat, he looked like a guy who might have owned a bar in South Boston — "Southie" — the Irish enclave where he'd been born. "One time I came up here," Dad remembered, "Cardinal Cushing took me aside. He said, 'Bill, come here, come here....' " Dad's voice went gravelly and high at the same time, which surprised me. He is an earnest man, not one for jokes or shtick; I had never heard him try to do a comic voice before. "When I was right up by his side," Dad continued, "he says to me, 'You wanna see my operation?' " My ears perked to attention, eyes went wide. Growing up, my family stories had been tales of Catholic peculiarity, with oddball clerics standing in for crazy uncles. I still had a taste for it. Not just for the comedy of the unexpected that my parents' memories of eccentric clergy never failed to provide (the priest dressed up as a mother superior one Halloween; the nun who had to be helped out of the rectory after a few too many sips of Tom Collins mix), but for the humanness of all involved: the human clumsiness of the God-minded. The stories I liked best were the ones that showed how anyone putting on the divine was bound to stumble like a toddler scuffing around in his mother's high heels. "Cushing leads me into that conference room right over there," Dad said, "and beside the same enormous table where we'll talk to the bishop today, he opens his shirt up and says," again that high gravelly voice, " 'I'm full of the cancer! They looked around inside me but couldn't get it out!' " Dad opened the flap of his suit coat, miming it, though now it seemed he was playing it up more to distract himself than to keep me entertained. "All I could think to say was, 'Wow.' "Another time I came here after I was married to let Cardinal Medeiros know what I was up to." Humberto Medeiros had followed Cushing. In his portrait, he stared down from behind big metal-rimmed glasses, his skin a shade darker than any other man on the wall. Imported from outside the diocese, Medeiros was the wrong man to inherit the worst of Boston's tribalism, the racism that boiled over to violence when black city kids began to be bussed to schools in predominantly white neighborhoods in the 1970s. "Why should I go to Southie?" Cardinal Medeiros infamously remarked when he was asked to make peace in his predecessor's hometown. "To get stoned? Is that what they'd like to see?" "Medeiros was very interested, listened intently," Dad said. "I reminded him of my work in the inner city, and told him about the ecumenical projects I'd begun. At the end of the conversation, he looked genuinely saddened, and said, 'I wish you'd come back to us, Bill....' " Dad laughed lightly. He'd dropped the funny voices. "But I hadn't gone anywhere! 'Look,' I said, 'I'm right here!' " His lips tightened at the memory. "Of course, that's not what he meant. I think he would have preferred if I left my family. That would have been the only way as far as the church was concerned." Next to Medeiros on the wall was Cardinal Law. After Medeiros died, Law was the great white hope of the archdiocese old guard — the Irish power network of priests, cops, and politicians that for so long had controlled the city and, with the exception of Medeiros's episcopacy, the church. Harvard-educated, quick-witted, Law had been greeted like Kennedy and Cushing rolled into one. Years later, after his resignation, he moved from the grand residence in Brighton to a convent in Maryland. The man who had dreamed of being the first American pope now had his pastoral authority limited to a group of elderly nuns. "I talked to Cardinal Law a few times, too," Dad said, "about the pensions — all the money the church owes to former priests." I'd heard about my father's latest crusade any number of times but he explained again, talking a bit too loudly for the near-silent house. "Some of those guys paid into the pension fund for twenty years before they left active ministry, and now the church won't let them have it. I told the cardinal we were going to do something about it." "I'll bet he was glad to see you," I said. Dad smiled. At the opposite end of the hall, the light from the chapel shifted, climbing the white walls, and there, in the corner, casting a soft blue glow on the sculpture, the Way of the Cross. Bodies grabbing bodies, men and women wrestling — with what? sex? death? change? They wove around one another like stitches pulled tight, as if the church itself had opened its gown to reveal the scar by which it lived. Dad's smile faded, and he began wringing his hands. Then he leaned back in his chair again, looked at his watch. How long would we have to wait? He sighed, long and emphatically. I don't know that I'd ever noticed him sighing this way before, but I knew the sound as well as I know my own voice. That long sigh, my one inheritance. Dad looked at his watch a second time in two minutes, then scanned the portraits again. Power comes, power goes, as fickle as grace. He had made his case to three cardinals. They were all gone. He kept coming back. "I must be out of my mind," he said. "I really must be out of my mind." Excerpted from "Vows," by Peter Manseau. Copyright © 2005 by Peter Manseau. Reprinted by permission of Free Press/Simon & Schuster, Inc. Available wherever books are sold.
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