Selections from Thomas Verner Moore's “Religious Values in Mental Hygiene” (1933)

Abstract

Thomas Verner Moore (1877-1969) was one of the most prominent Catholic psychologists and psychiatrists of the first half of the 20th century. Born in Louisville, Kentucky, to a Presbyterian father and a Catholic mother, and raised as a Catholic, he entered the Congregation of the Missionary Priests of St. Paul the Apostle—the order called the “Paulists”—in 1896 and was ordained in 1901. The Paulist novitiate, located on the campus of the Catholic University of America, founded in 1887, provided Moore with the opportunity to study the “new psychology,” that is, experimental psychology, with Edward Aloysius Pace (1861-1938), who was a priest, a psychologist, and a Thomistic philosopher of renown. After Moore earned a doctorate in psychology in 1903 under Pace, he studied with Wilhelm Wundt, a leading light in experimental psychology, in Leipzig. Moore began teaching at the Catholic University in 1910. He met with the psychologist Lightner Witmer to discern how to establish a child clinic. To do so, he needed an MD, and he returned to Germany to study with Emil Kraepelin, the “grandfather” of the DSM. He also studied with Oswald Külpe, another leading experimentalist. The outbreak of World War I cut his stay short. Upon his return to Washington, he completed an MD under Adolf Meyer, at Johns Hopkins University. Moore then opened a clinic at Providence Hospital, Washington, in 1916. He served in the Armed Forces in World War I as a psychiatrist. In the 1920s, he left the Paulists and established a Benedictine Abbey, St. Anselm's, in Washington. He was a friend of Charles Spearman, who developed factor analysis, and Moore did statistical studies, including those investigating psychiatric categories. He taught several generations of graduate students, many of whom went on to establish psychology departments at Catholic colleges. When he retired from teaching, he entered the Carthusian order. He died in Spain in 1969.