Celibate: A Memoir

by Maria Giura

Overview

When twenty-eight-year-old Maria Giura fell in love with Catholic priest Father James Infanzi, she had no idea how needy and angry they both were nor how complicated their attraction would become. His attention seemed to fill the void left by her fractured family, but he also seemed to be a sign for her to finally face the celibate vocation she’d been running from ever since she first felt God’s call. Celibate focuses on her ten-year struggle to let go of this priest, to heal from her childhood, and to finally embrace her true calling. Fiercely honest and tender, this memoir is ultimately a story about surrender, forgiveness, and facing one’s deepest needs.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781627202152
Publisher:	Apprentice House Press
Publication date:	10/01/2019
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Sales rank:	302,435
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Maria Giura, PhD, is also the author of What My Father Taught Me, a collection of memory poems, which was a finalist for the Paterson Book Prize. Her writing has appeared in several journals including Prime Number, Presence, VIA, Italian Americana, Ovunque Siamo, and Lips. She has won awards from the Academy of American Poets and the Center for Women Writers and is a judge for the Lauria/Frasca Poetry Prize. Giura has taught Literature and Writing at St. John's University, Montclair State University, and Binghamton University where she earned her doctorate in English. She lives in NYC.

Editorial Reviews

10/21/2019

With unsettling candor, poet Giura (What My Father Taught Me) relays her reluctance to accept a lifelong calling to give herself to God and end an obsessive love-hate relationship with a Catholic priest. A thematic triptych of need, jealousy, and invisibility emerges early on as Giura’s younger sister’s birth usurped her mother’s attentions and divorce separated her from her angry, distant father. At age eight, she “felt a tug on my heart” upon seeing the Catholic religious order depicted as “a giant circle of love.” Dating as a young adult only widened the divide between divine and secular love: “I had no idea I was wounded... I attracted emotionally unavailable men like my father.” At age 26, while witnessing a moment “so pure and happy” between a parish priest and a disabled child after Mass, she experienced a physical and spiritual attraction to Father James Infanzi, “a young Cary Grant”; their conversations quickly gave way to kissing and sex. At the same time, she joined the Sisters of Charity, despite her increasing revulsion at the idea of becoming a nun. Giura’s naked honesty can come across as self-obsessed as she eventually leaves the Sisters in order to chart her own path of spiritual celibacy. Though Giura writes that “I let go of to God,” the ending feels unsatisfying. But the meat of this work—Giura’s struggles with her relationship with God—is complex and emotionally wrought. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly

Maria Giura’s Celibate is an impassioned portrait of a self in utter struggle over, and ambivalence about God, family, sex, and love. Giura exquisitely recounts her own soul-searing conflict, drawing the reader into the turbulence that was her life but also compelling the reader to believe that now, finally, she is on the right path, that now she has reached her truth and peace. An incredibly exhilarating read. — Kathleen McCormick, author of Dodging Satan

Deeply human and finely wrought, Celibate is Giura’s strikingly honest examination of her battle to hang onto her faith in the midst of trying to understand—and free herself from—her complex relationship with a Catholic priest. — Michael Steinberg, author of Still Pitching:

A Memoir

A beautifully rendered and heartfelt look at the place that contemporary women have in the Roman Catholic Church

and one brave woman’s struggle to reconcile her faith and sexuality in this context. — Leslie Heywood, author of Pretty Good for a Girl

Celibate tells a different kind of vocation story. Vivid and passionate, it speaks to both the afflictions and the victory that can come from discerning and following God’s voice. A gripping memoir from first to last page. — Jana M. Bennett, author of Singleness and the Church: A New Theology of the Single Life

Celibate gives a poignant picture of the Church that most do not see. Priest, woman, and Church are tangled together in a romantic, forbidden web, and the boundaries between Church and society-at-large blur to the point of clear transparency. A must read for all, surely, and perhaps especially for Catholics and Italian Americans. — Anthony Julian Tamburri, Dean, John D. Calandra Italian American Institute

From the Publisher