They Are Their Brothers’ Keepers : The ministry: At Serra House, priests help one another. It is the only recovery center in the Western U.S. for those suffering from alcoholism, other chemical dependencies and emotional problems.

When he had been sober for a year, Xavier stood before an alcoholism recovery group in Highland Park and revealed his secret.

“I confessed that I am a priest and I cried in front of the people. I don’t know why--probably because I broke the boundary. (But) the people accepted that I was a priest.”

And, that he was human--something that he himself has had trouble accepting.

At 50, the heavy-set priest, who asked that his real name not be used, looks tough but sounds tentative as he recalls that trip to the podium seven years ago--and his years of drinking.

Born in Latin America, he said he was an introverted little boy who discovered as a young man--even before he was ordained--that drinking made him feel like the life of the party. And for years he was caught up in a cycle of drinking bouts and dry periods. “I thought God left me without help,” he said.

Clergymen who suffer from alcoholism may face several problems: a drive for perfection, disagreements with an authoritarian structure, struggles with the demands of communal life and leadership, and the image of the ministry itself.

“Priests are taught to be rugged individuals, to sacrifice, to be able to sublimate,” said Father Mike Walsh, a recovering alcoholic and program director at Serra House, the only recovery center in the Western United States for Catholic priests and brothers suffering from alcoholism, other chemical dependencies and emotional problems. “They’re always taking care of other people’s problems. It’s very difficult for a priest to be able to ask for help.”

While no one knows the rate of alcoholism among the Catholic clergy, church leaders increasingly are acknowledging the problem and adopting intervention and treatment policies and programs.

Two years ago, Brother Frank Cicchitto, a Franciscan friar based in Los Angeles, founded Serra House. To date, about 35 men have gone through the program, which can accommodate up to 10 residents, and 80% to 85% of them have remained sober. The staff of the program, located in the mid-Wilshire area, includes two live-in and four other mental health professionals.

It is at Serra House that Xavier recently found sobriety.

“Little by little I started to drink socially,” Xavier said of his early years in the priesthood. By the time he was 34, he had reached a point where a night of drinking would be followed by a morning of drinking. Concerned parishioners notified his bishop and he was sent to a psychiatrist for three months of therapy. It helped, Xavier said, and he quit drinking for a short period until life presented difficulties--or excuses--with the deaths of his father and his bishop.

The diocese sent him to work in a small town in his native country where he was a closet drunk for two years. He says that assignment was followed by a posting in Mexico where his work was sidetracked by a small group of drinking buddies--also priests.

Finally, he hit the skids. He sold his car and belongings and came, unauthorized by religious superiors, to California: “I felt unworthy to work as a priest. I felt disappointed with myself, sick emotionally, resentful of priests, teachers, classmates, even God.”

Eventually, he hooked up with Alcoholics Anonymous, returned to priestly work in the Los Angeles Archdiocese and started an AA group in his parish. But, after eight years of sobriety, he had “a slip” about six months ago.

“Suddenly, I found myself drinking. I spent about three days in my room and had about 18 beers. And then I went by myself to the hospital. I felt an obsession (to drink) and I know how it is. I did not want to go down and down.”

After two weeks in a treatment program at Doctors Hospital, he spent five months at Serra House, and returned to his parish just before Christmas.

While still at the recovery house, he said, “I want sobriety. I want to stop drinking for all my life. I would like to return to my parish, and I think with the help I get in this place, I will do a better job.”

The average stay at Serra House is 90 days, although some residents have stayed longer than a year. Some ask to come. Others, denying their illness or resisting treatment, are referred by their religious orders or the L.A. Archdiocese as a result of an intervention, an organized confrontation--and demand for a plan of action--by people such as employers, colleagues, relatives or friends. In the case of an intervention, residents usually go through a detoxification program first.

Although the Archdiocese or religious order usually pays residents’ fees, (about $90 per day) this does not cover all costs, said Cicchitto, who is now the executive director of Serra House. So the center relies on outside contributions. One goal is to lower the fee, he said, which he does occasionally.

The residents attend in-house meetings and open AA meetings, receive individual and group psychotherapy at other sites, study AA’s 12-step program and, as they progress in their recovery, practice their ministry by helping at parishes on weekends.

“Our guys do not just go to priest meetings, but it’s important they have a place where they can unload personal stuff without running into parishioners,” said Cicchitto, a recovering alcoholic and licensed clinical social worker. “They have to have the freedom of a safe place to deal with their own specific needs and issues. Somehow, religious men and women are not supposed to have problems.”

Said one priest at a recent house meeting, “I have degrees in theology and philosophy,” but being in Serra House, going through the 12 steps, “praying, meditating, opening myself up to God--this is a new awareness.”

Indeed, it sounded new. Yet these men are priests, the people who are supposed to be experts on God, the mediators between man and God. They have taught the faithful about God’s love and fury--from the pulpit, in the confessional, in the classroom, in the rectory. But now, they find themselves floundering, with all of their assumptions thrown into question.

At Serra House, Cicchitto said, “it’s all up for questioning.”

Referring to the specific problems facing priests, Cicchitto said, “You see (perfectionism) with a lot of alcoholics, but particularly with clergy. We’re very demanding of ourselves. The role, and the expectations of others, are sometimes unrealistic.”

Cicchitto enumerated some of the concerns the men needed to face:

“How can you still be a leader in a healthy sense and still be one of the common folks allowed to be human?

“How do you submit to authority, belief and control when you disagree with what’s coming down?

“How do you work out a healthy (balance) between the alcoholic and God’s will (a primary tenet of AA) and the alcoholic’s relationship to those empowered with the structural authority in the church or religious community?

“How does one empower oneself with one’s own authority? It’s a question of balance.”

One recent evening, at an open AA meeting at Serra House, the residents were joined by about 30 men and women in the smoke-filled living room to read from AA literature--and to listen to one recovering alcoholic tell his story to the group. The speaker for the evening was a lay Catholic from a family of 10 children. The man told of his problems with self-esteem and a poor sense of identity stemming from a family with too little love and too many people, and how he connected that, and the stern, punitive atmosphere of parochial schools, to his drinking.

When he had finished, most of those who were moved to share their own experiences were women. No residents of Serra House spoke up.

Later Cicchitto said that was not unusual, and added, “As a rule the guys we have in the house now tend to be on the passive side. . . . Also, there’s a certain level of isolationism that occurs with someone in a leadership position.”

At that meeting, the speaker finally singled out one priest and asked him to share.

“I’m an alcoholic,” said Dan, a 62-year-old silver-haired priest with an Irish brogue. He said he related to the speaker’s description “of this low self-esteem or whatever the hell it is,” and added that he, too, had experienced a very repressive school system.

Several days later at Serra House, Dan, who also asked that his real name not be used, talked, somewhat reluctantly, protesting: “My story is not very special.”

He grew up on a farm in Ireland and attended schools where “the priests used the cane. It was scary. The seminary was very strict, too. There was a lot of emotional punishment there.”

He came to the United States as a newly ordained priest in 1954, “very immature, shy, self-conscious--I still am, I suppose”-- and landed in a parish in Los Angeles where there was, he said, a very strict pastor.

Dan found that if he had to attend a parish meeting and felt uptight, having a drink helped him get through it. That was the pattern for about 15 years, he said, with the drinking gradually catching up to him, especially on his days off. He would give it up for Lent and Advent, but would return to drinking at other times of the year, remaining unassertive with a continual string of difficult pastors.

And then came 1974, the year Dan thought he’d get his own parish and become a pastor.

“I remember the night I didn’t get it. I drank quite a lot,” he said, and then put it more bluntly: “I got drunk.”

The disease progressed. Dan became a chaplain at a hospital, where a nun on the staff noticed his drinking and intervened. Several times. A cycle began: Dan would go through a variety of treatment programs and hospitalizations and dry spells--until a class reunion made him feel uptight, or a social obligation, such as a Holy Name Club luncheon, came along. Then there were frequent and quick transfers from one work assignment to another and halfhearted and infrequent attendance at AA meetings. In 1988, the archdiocese sent him to Serra House where he spent eight months. After his release he started drinking again and returned. He has been there now for 13 months, he said, and has had about 18 months of sobriety.

“Geez, that’s quite a litany,” he said, shaking his head.

Father Terry Ritchie, a board member of Serra House, directs a substance-abuse ministry for the Los Angeles Archdiocese that deals primarily with priests and members of religious orders. Like most dioceses and religious orders in the United States, the Los Angeles Archdiocese (an archdiocese is the principal diocese in a regional group), the nation’s largest, has adopted intervention policies, and also evaluates, counsels, and refers clergy for treatment.

Both Ritchie and Cicchitto said they were seeing an increase in alcohol and substance-abuse problems among clergy, and it was one of the factors that led to the founding of Serra House. Cicchitto said he sees several reasons for the increase: more cases are being reported, there are more vehicles for treating the disease, and the general population, as well as the clergy, is more educated about alcoholism. In addition, he said, “addiction is probably on the upswing in general--I mean the addictive process in the (American ) culture.”

In the mythology that surrounds the church, there is one common assumption among laymen: Alcoholism among the clergy is directly attributable to celibacy.

“I agree this is the perception,” Ritchie said, shaking his head a little helplessly at the futility of trying to disprove such a myth. “I see alcoholism more physically based, and culturally based, than just the narrow aspect of celibacy. Celibacy is one aspect of a culture. I just have no gut feeling that celibacy is an issue in the onset of alcoholism.”

For example, he said, he found more merit in the connection between culture and alcoholism.

“Irish Americans have a higher rate of alcoholism than all Americans added together, and there is a high percentage of Irish in the clergy.”

(Spokesmen at both the National Council on Alcoholism and Drug Abuse, and the National Clearinghouse for Alcohol and Drug Information, in Washington, confirmed that Irish Americans have one of the highest rates of alcoholism of any ethnic group.)

What is frequently true of celibate life, Cicchitto said, is loneliness and isolation. Unnecessarily so.

“Being celibate was not meant to be taken too literally, from the standpoint of taking it to mean one must not get involved emotionally to the point where one’s own nurturing needs did not get taken care of,” Cicchitto said. “Concern for others if good, but ‘dying to the self’ got overemphasized. You can’t give what you don’t have. Only recently we’re identifying that clergy and religious have intimacy needs.”

Xavier seems to have reflected long and hard on his life and drinking. It is not easy for him to talk about his past, and he does so in stages.

He was not sexually abused, he said, but was an emotionally abused child, and directly attributes his alcoholism to that circumstance. That knowledge has not entirely freed him, he said, adding there is still work to do.

He told of having gone recently to see the film, “Home Alone,” a comedy about a little boy whose parents inadvertently leave him behind when they go on a family trip to Europe. “I cried five times. Even with therapy. It’s a comedy, but for me it’s part of my life to feel abandoned, to feel people don’t have any interest in me. Always when I went to movies about kids, I was crying. I didn’t feel loved. I felt rejected.”

Xavier told this story shyly, but with a growing sense of sympathy and acceptance of himself.

“In the program,” he said, “I learn to love myself, to recognize my values. I accept I have mistakes and failures, but I know I have values to work as a man and as a priest.”

It is a lesson that the directors of Serra House think is crucial to impart.

“So many priests have such a low image of themselves,” Walsh said. “Maybe not on an intellectual level--we’re great intellectualizers--but we have to get it across and into the open that God loves you. Your life is not a shame; you are what you are--a child of God. This program is very important for religious men to help them learn how to live a full and meaningful life, to live with the disease and put their talents to work.”

Beyond the meaning for the priest, Cicchitto said, he hopes Serra House “makes a dent around the area of denial in the religious and clerical communities.” And perhaps most important of all, he said, he hopes it serves as a tangible example of one overriding message about alcoholism: “No one is exempt, not even a priest.”