Global Vatican II, Psychology, and the Clergy Abuse Crisis

Catholic professionals – academics, clinicians, therapists – began to take psychology and psychoanalysis seriously during the Great Depression and the Second World War. But a vigorous global network of these religious psychologists emerged in response to the Second Vatican Council’s call for Catholics to study the social sciences. The men and women in this circle began to achieve scholarly prominence and institutional power in the 1960s and 1970s. This paper reconstructs this circuit, which initially included individuals from Russia, Ireland, Germany, France, England, Belgium, the Netherlands, Spain, and Poland. The Atlantic network then expanded as participants presented research all over the world, including Latin America. American psychotherapist Richard Sipe traveled to conferences Brazil and Argentina to deliver papers on religious life. He provides one example of a global exchange on psychology, sex, and priests. Sipe became close friends with Dutch theologian and psychologist Henri Nouwen while on a research fellowship at the Menninger Foundation in Topeka, Kansas. After Sipe published his landmark study of celibacy, he received a personal letter from German theologian Bernard Hring commenting on how it was the best treatment of the topic he had ever read.

This paper argues that psychological Republic of Letters – we might call it – laid a critical intellectual foundation for the study of the sex lives of priests. Many participants went on to run treatment centers that diagnosed and treated priests who acted out sexually. The efforts took on significance as the global clergy abuse crisis unfolded in the 1980s and 1990s.