I’m Fergus, a North Carolina-based writer and a recent graduate of Columbia Journalism School. I’m currently writing a book, a work of literary nonfiction about my father, who came to America as an ordained Catholic priest, and my mother, who came as a Catholic nun fresh out of the novitiate. They were unknown to each other before being dispatched by the church from different towns in Ireland to Alabama in the 1960s. Amid the forces unleashed by Vatican II and the turmoil of the Civil Rights Movement, they fell in love. Together, my parents faced the terrifying implications of their deep passion for each other, particularly the ostracism they would encounter both in Alabama and from family back in Ireland. What followed has become the stuff of family legend and a Southern tale of social upheaval.