At St. Joseph’s Seminary in Westmont, Ill., where I went to school for three years in the early ’60s, Father Sennen, a Franciscan, asked everyone at freshman orientation to list reasons for seeking the priesthood. Answers varied from the very practical “wanting a good education,” to the altruistic, “to serve God and my fellow man.” But a reason that made almost everyone’s list, if not always right at the top, was to ensure personal salvation. To save oneself.

I thought of that fall morning session we had over two decades ago, while reading the dozens of news stories on priest scandals in the last two weeks, all of which have led me to believe that the Catholic church’s vow of celibacy for its priests is not necessarily the cause of pedophilic explosions. More likely the idea of religious commitment as a means of seclusion and cleansing, and the church as a harbor of secrecy, isolation and, yes, celibacy, made the priesthood seem a logical refuge for some with sexual confusion and fears, and for others who saw it as a refuge and mask for the demons within.

This may suggest that some pedophiles understand their afflictions and then act upon a noble motivation to heal themselves, as though the religious life were the “dry county” or the rehab center for their particular disease. But for others, the priestly robes and the certification of sexual abstinence may be means of camouflaging and even denying perverse inclinations.

Religion as a curative or a shield has not been a phenomenon exclusive to priests. The celebrated sex scandals of Jesse Jackson, Jim Bakker or Jimmy Swaggart testify to that fact. Although these cases involved neither pedophilia nor the question of celibacy’s blameworthiness, the perverse revelations about Swaggart, for example (his obsession with prostitutes and theatrically staged but unrequited fantasies), and the sublimated eroticism that fueled his fanatical sex-bashing preaching, make a persuasive case for the “hiding the devil behind the pulpit” syndrome.

More telling might have been the arrest and incarceration of Mark Cooper in 1994 for child pornography charges and solicitation of young girls. Diagnosed as a schizophrenic and pedophile, Cooper, a resident of Oak Forest, Ill., was deemed unsafe for release even after extensive drug therapy and confinement in federal prisons and hospitals. Cooper had an insatiable and fatalistic attraction for young girls, coupled with schizophrenic feelings that he was God, a delusion that enabled his personal conviction of innocence, of being “above the fray,” even as he deadpanned to a judge at one of his trials that he would kill the first young girl he encountered were he to be released. So his escape was another personality altogether, and a divine one, at that.

My own experience with this religion-as-a-red-flag phenomenon was as a community college instructor for convicted pedophile Daniel Shellstrom. I met him in the spring of 1994, where I teach English at College of DuPage. My 9 a.m. writing class was comprised of about two dozen 18- and 19-year-old male and female students. At 29, Shellstrom stood apart, though his presence was not unusual campus wide at C.O.D., which enrolls 8,000 full-time and 30,000 part-time students per quarter.

What did stand out at the time was his obsession with the Bible, which he managed to make the topic (or at least subtopic) in each of the six required essays; when the assignment was to write about family, he wrote about his wife and children accompanying him to Bible class each week. What drew slightly more attention was his penchant for staying after class, gently proselytizing about Jesus to some of the younger lingerers.

Shellstrom was not hard-sell in his “missionary” work. He had brown wavy hair, a handsome Donny Osmond kind of face, and an ever-present smile, even when he was ignored or mocked by any of the teens. At such times he’d look to me with that smile, presuming some kind of mutual elder condescension by both of us to the members of the whatever-you-do, don’t-bore-me generation.

You meet all kinds as a teacher; so I tolerated his crusade, occasionally penning devil’s advocate questions in the margins of his essays: “Wouldn’t God have blessed the others, too?” -- that sort. And I let him know when his subversion of the essay topics might also subvert his grade.

One Monday morning, he showed up at class with his 4-year-old son, apologizing for not being able to get replacement day care. I assured him it was no problem, that I, in fact, welcomed children, as well as any other diversions that might waken or inspire my pupils, who were now filing and fumbling in, taking their seats with little notice of the pre-schooler. The little boy’s hair was wetted and combed, his Bible school clothes freshly laundered and pressed, and I remember thinking he likely had some firm instructions from Dad on how to behave, as he sat quiet but busy with his crayons.

“Does anyone in here know the ABC’s?” I asked the class.

While I was not looking directly at the little boy, I could see in my periphery his head pop up from the coloring book. Teenage heads rose and rotated to see him.

After I repeated the question, the child’s hand reluctantly rose.

“Yes, you young man,” I said. “Would you recite them for us?”

The boy looked to his father, checking to see that it was all right. And with the help of the ABC song, he got through all 26 letters and received an ovation from the class. His father’s beaming was so bright and emotional that I wouldn’t have been surprised if he had had tears.

The school term ended in June, and I took off for a summer of travel.

The following August, while packing for yet a final road trip, I was watching the local news when videotape of a man in county jail orange jumpsuit, being led in handcuffs and leg manacles, caught my eye. Though turned downward, his face had a familiar cast. Or maybe it was the wavy hair.

I stopped to listen to the story of his having allegedly raped a 9-year-old girl in Villa Park. The suspect was arrested in his own home after his wife had seen the police sketch on the news and turned him in. He and his wife had two children (a 4-year-old son and a 5year-old daughter), it was reported, and a posh home in the fastest growing suburb in the country, Naperville. The accused had a promising career as a supervisor at a manufacturing plant, was a member in good standing at his local Evangelical church, and was a part-time student at College of DuPage. And then they flashed his name and age: Daniel Shellstrom, 29; the same Dan from my class last spring.

I searched my file for class records, searched my brain for details that resolved my shock, that might make sense. They said he climbed onto the balcony of the little girl’s home, took off his clothes outside and broke in, then sexually assaulted her. His wife agonized over turning him in, but his likeness on the police sketch and his troubling sexual history of pedophilia led to her phone call.

A videotaped confession was followed later by a foiled jail suicide attempt and a sentence of life in prison. Though I never had to testify to what I knew of Daniel Shellstrom, I thought for many months about the demons inside his head, the ones he tried to fight off with the Bible, with his churchgoing, with parenthood, with success, with family life, and with all the manifestations of wholesome American normalcy. From the B student I had known those 12 weeks in spring, and from the fierce pride and heart bursting love I saw in his face as he sat next to his son that memorable Monday, I was convinced that there were two Daniel Shellstroms, one waging war with the other, one even trying to kill the other in a DuPage county jail cell in Wheaton.

But in the past two weeks, as the litany of lives broken by pedophiles wearing Roman collars becomes lengthier with each news report, I’m still unsure and will probably never know whether Shellstrom used religious devotion to fight the demons or to abet them.

Are all pedophiles schizophrenics? Does religion -- and especially the priesthood -- provide a zone where they may thrive?

The answers, if we don’t already have them these past weeks, are forthcoming. But the immediate need, the life-and-death need, is for the Catholic church to continue to expose and isolate the misanthropes that have been entrenched in their ranks, and to implement massive screening to prevent further incursions. In the meantime, it should reform and reinvent its priesthood so that it no longer is sought out as a secret sanctuary for those who are sexually ill, and for those who would sexually terrorize children.

David McGrath teaches writing and Native American literature at College of DuPage. His essays and short stories have been published in The Chicago Reader, Education Digest, Chicago Tribune and Artful Dodge. His short story "Broken Wing" was nominated for the Pushcart Award for Fiction, and last year he published his first novel, Siege at Ojibwa.