Profession and Faith: The National Guild of Catholic Psychiatrists, 1950-1968

In the early 1950's, Roman Catholics in America were underrepresented as psychiatric patients and practitioners, and a group of lay Catholic psychiatrists organized a National Guild of Catholic Psychiatrists and published the Bulletin of the Guild of Catholic Psychiatrists as a first step towards establishing an institutional Catholic presence within American psychiatry. From 1952 to 1968, the members of the Guild taught Catholic clergy to adopt psychiatric methods both for the selection and training of their members, and for the pastoral counsel with which they succored the laity. The Guild successfully introduced psychiatry into the Catholic experience, but they failed to create a thriving subculture within American psychiatry; the Guild is an exemplary failure in the efforts of Roman Catholics in America to create distinctly Catholic institutions.