Scenes From a Blasphemous Marriage

To many people, Peter Manseau's parentage -- his mother a nun, his father a priest -- represents yet another embarrassing example of the Catholic Church's many recent transgressions.

But Manseau's parents never saw it that way. When they met in a Boston storefront ministry in the spring of 1968, the world seemed on the cusp of a progressive rethinking. Vatican II was injecting the Church with a charismatic new sense of modernity, and the age of priestly marriages seemed finally to have arrived.

Today, the social revolutions of the '60s seem quaintly anachronistic, and Manseau's parents' marriage -- now in its thirty-sixth year -- remains a minor scandal. Though his father still considers himself a priest and continues to minister to the poor, because of his marriage the Vatican basically denies his status as such.

This act of definace has kept he and his wife on the fringes of the Church leadership, though they've never been entirely excommunicated, and they continue to lobby the Church to change its rules about marriage. In his deeply personal memoir Vows, Manseau details the love triangle that has inextricably tied his mother, his father and the Catholic Church for nearly forty years.

Many people don't realize that priests, and even popes, haven't always been celibate. When and why did that change, and why hasn't it ever turned back the other way?

There's always been a tension between the ideas of sex as sinful and sex as sacramental. In the twelfth century, it was ruled that priests couldn't marry, partly because too many priests' sons were inheriting their churches and the bishops couldn't control who had authority. As to why it hasn't changed back, there's no reason for the power structure to want that. They have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo.

But priests continued to have children after it was outlawed. There's a history of illegitimate children born to popes.

Yes. The "double monastery," which was a connected monastery for monks and convent for nuns, was a common phenomenon in Medieval Europe, and that practice ended because there were too many pregnant nuns.

Your father advocates allowing priests to marry as part of the solution to the sexual-abuse problem. Why doesn't the Church agree that this solution is viable?

In the aftermath of the sexual-abuse scandal, the church went after priests like my father. They thought that priests who expressed any sexuality, whether it was marriage and consensual relationships or the abuse cases you've heard about, were all the same thing. There's even a phrase for it in canon law: a "carnal sacrilege," which is a sin against the priesthood and against the Church itself.

Your father confessed to you that he'd had a sexual relationship with his elderly mentor, Father Tom. How did that conversation come about?

It was really slow coming to the surface. The more I learned about my father's seminary training, the more I would ask him if he'd ever noticed any kind of homosexuality, and he would always say, "No, no, no." Then he would start to admit, "Well, there was a little bit that I saw here and there at St. John's Seminary." He finally told me about Father Tom, and I think he was able to do that because in his post-ministerial life, he's become a psychologist.

When he finally told me the story, he finished by telling me what a wonderful man [Father Tom] was. He still tells me that. He wanted to make it clear that he feels this man was a mostly positive influence in his life. It's such a complicated relationship, the relationship that the Church creates between young men and priests. And I think [my father] has only started to realize that now.

When your father was training to be a priest, he'd go on dates with girls after seminary. He was living a double life.