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Mission & State
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Confronting the culture of sex abuse in the shadow of the Old Mission.
By Sam Slovick
July 12, 2013
Singing birds and shouting children announce another cacophonous end to a Garden Street Academy school day. A security guard patrols the lush property just behind the Old Mission Santa Barbara as girls and boys in bright colors greet the afternoon following a long day of sitting in hard seats. Though you won’t find any mention of it on the Academy’s website, prior to its current incarnation as a “progressive” K-12 private school, the facility was known for almost 100 years as St. Anthony’s Seminary, a vocational high school for boys studying to be priests. The Franciscan Friars Province of Saint Barbara, adherents of the ascetic spirituality of St. Francis of Assisi, ran the seminary. The friars lived across the narrow road at the Old Mission Santa Barbara.
The Franciscans originally started St. Anthony’s in 1896 in the Mission’s carpenter shop as a boys’ school called St. Anthony’s Seraphic College. It was intended to be a four-year high school with an optional year for students considering the priesthood to prepare for novitiate. The friars expanded the school in 1898 onto a 12-acre plot just a few hundred feet behind the Mission.
St. Anthony’s Seminary held its first classes at the Garden Street property in 1901, with the mission of grooming young men for the clergy, which it did for decades before closing ignominiously in 1987. By then, it had sealed its fate as one of the charter institutions in the Catholic clergy’s emerging sex abuse crisis.
With the children now gone for the day, the birds settle back into the tall trees around the Garden Street Academy, and the afternoon turns calm. Across the street, Paul Fericano can be found in a shady patch in the back of the Mission. He is contemplating a large boulder with a bronze plaque on its face and the larger context within which it exists. The boulder, a symbol of St. Anthony’s grim legacy, carries talismanic freight for Fericano.
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