Any examination of the sexual abuse crisis afflicting the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles leads inevitably to a bell-towered campus in the rolling hills of Camarillo: St. John's Seminary. . .
Several former students recall a licentious atmosphere at St. John's that might have accommodated a range of sexual behavior, especially in the years before the 1990s.
They say that many classmates routinely broke their celibacy vows, that emotionally troubled students were allowed to drift though the seminary, and that administrators either were ignorant about sex on campus or turned a blind eye to it.
Some told of seminarians having sex in St. John's dormitories, bathrooms and orange groves.
"There was an awful lot that was shocking," said Jaime Romo, who lost his passion for the priesthood after three years at St. John's in the early 1980s. Now an education professor at the University of San Diego, a Catholic school, Romo has sued the Los Angeles Archdiocese, accusing the late priest Leland Boyer of molesting him as a teenager.
He remembered a small group of students who dressed in nuns' clothes during his time at St. John's, and others who were "full-blown alcoholics." He said the faculty avoided any talk of sex: "There was no discussion of celibacy."
A number of active priests who attended St. John's said they had never witnessed sexual activity at the seminary, and believed the administration would not have tolerated it. "Could guys have carried on a secret life? Sure," said Leon Hutton, a St. John's history teacher who graduated in 1980. "But it certainly wouldn't have been condoned."
I know nothing about St. John's Seminary, but if this article is accurate, it supports the idea that molesters are part of cells that grew up in permissive seminaries, which then points back to the loosening trends after Vatican II that have crippled the American Catholic Church.
