Given what we learned this week about the horrible sexual abuse of children by priests of the nation’s oldest diocese, I suppose this qualifies as irony: Offending clergy once came regularly to Baltimore for psychiatric treatment in a Catholic hospital.
The Seton Psychiatric Institute, established in 1844 by the Sisters of Charity, was said to be the leading mental health facility in the country for Catholic priests. Thousands went there for help with a variety of problems.
Or maybe they just needed a “spiritual sabbatical,” a little break from the problems they had created in their parishes.
Either way, to Baltimore they came.
The hospital, on the grounds of what became Seton Business Park, closed in 1973 after decades of good service to both the clinical care of clerics and to the official cover-up of their depravity: Priests accused of sexual abuse went to Seton instead of facing criminal prosecution or being defrocked. Many returned to the scenes of their crimes or were shipped to other unsuspecting parishes, and it’s clear by now that the abusive behavior of many continued.
This routine was common knowledge within the hierarchy but not among the thousands of Catholic worshippers who once crowded into pews from Baltimore to Boston.
Several years ago, when stories of abusive priests started appearing in the pages of The Baltimore Sun and other newspapers, we learned more about Seton from a priest who had worked there as a therapist in the hospital’s final years.
His name was Richard Sipe, a native of Minnesota who landed in Baltimore on a fellowship in psychiatry in 1965. For five years, Sipe conducted intake conferences with each new Seton patient, including the many priests sent there to avoid criminal prosecution. At Seton, Sipe said he discovered case histories of priests who had sex with minors going back to 1917.
In 1970, Sipe joined many others in leaving the priesthood. He married a former Maryknoll sister, also a psychotherapist, but he continued to live in the Baltimore area and counsel priests with serious problems.
Based on what Sipe later reported in reports and books, predatory priests were common knowledge in the religious ranks. Sipe learned about it firsthand, after his ordination in 1959, when he was assigned to teach in a parish high school.
“I became immediately aware of sexual activity by priests and religious with both minors and adults,” he recalled. “This revelation to me of a secret system concealing the lack of celibate practice among some Catholic priests and religious prompted my interest in counseling [them].”
Sipe noted that, at the time, the primary concern of church leaders was avoiding scandal, not helping victims.
Having counseled hundreds of priests, Sipe found that half of them were not celibate and that roughly 6% were involved with minors, the latter claim affirmed by The Boston Globe Spotlight team in its deep look at problem priests in the Boston archdiocese. Sipe, who consulted with the Globe for its investigation, believed that the vow of celibacy forced priests to live a secret life and to abide the secrets of others, thus the toleration of decades of abuse.
Sipe described the priesthood as a world of emotionally and sexually immature men “locked” in an adolescent stage of development, poorly prepared for the celibate life. “People have sexual impulses that they have to deal with, and the church doesn’t deal with them,” Sipe told me during an interview in 2017. “Church leaders hold up celibacy, as if it is some kind of ideal, as if it is even possible.”
Some Catholics — those who remain in the pews and still care — get testy when anyone argues celibacy as a major factor in the deviant behavior of men who took vows. They cite reports and articles that either found or asserted no direct correlation between celibacy and the abuse of minors. But these people misunderstand Sipe and what his research showed: that the vow of celibacy breeds the secrecy that allowed the deviance to fester.
Celibacy was also the deal-killer for men who, over the last 60 years, either wanted to stay in the priesthood or considered seeking ordination. The Catholic Church continues to maintain that there’s nothing wrong with the all-male, ostensibly celibate priesthood. Cardinals and bishops stand by this illogical and theologically dubious position even as priests retire, die or leave their ministry.
There were nearly 60,000 Catholic priests in the country in 1965; there are about 34,000 today, according to Georgetown University’s Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate. During those years, the church needed to keep as many priests as possible within its ranks, and that sometimes meant recycling predators from parish to parish.
All of this has been well-documented by now. So the nearly 500-page report from the Maryland Attorney General on the dark history of clergy sexual abuse in the Archdiocese of Baltimore hardly seems “astonishing” or shocking.
But it obviously stirs deep pain — “the torment of memory,” as Gabriel García Márquez put it — in the hearts and minds of the victims, our Catholic brothers and sisters who suffered. They’ve been forced to live with the shame, the shattering sense of betrayal, the anger and disillusionment since they were kids.
The rest of us, the fortunate Catholics who avoided the grasp of predators, came to feelings of betrayal, anger and disillusionment much later in life. We all live with that now.
