Sister Maureen Paul Turlish, a tenacious advocate for survivors of childhood sexual abuse by Roman Catholic clergymen, died on July 18 in Cincinnati. She was 79.

The cause was viral encephalitis, Paul Turlish, her brother and only immediate survivor, said.

While she had an abiding concern for children, articles in The Boston Globe and elsewhere beginning in 2002 that explored the abuse of minors by priests transformed her into one of the few religious sisters to publicly protest what she denounced as a “conspiracy, collusion and cover-up” by her church’s hierarchy.

“At the time, she was the only religious woman that would publicly stand up for this issue,” the Rev. Thomas P. Doyle, a canon lawyer and advocate for victims of clergy sexual abuse, was quoted as saying by her order, the Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur.

Sister Maureen took to the picket line demanding compensation for victims and an extension of lapsed deadlines to prosecute predators and to lodge civil claims against them. She wrote letters to newspapers, initially under a pen name. She then abandoned anonymity as a founding member of the National Survivor Advocates Coalition and Catholic Whistleblowers.

She was 9 years old when she took her first turn on the picket line, joining her father during a strike at the Good & Plenty candy factory, she recalled. Her first exposure to the Sisters of Notre Dame was through her art teacher in high school. Her father insisted that she wait until she was 21 before becoming a nun.

After working as a secretary at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, she entered a convent in Maryland in 1960 and took her vows in 1963. She added the name Paul in memory of her father.

Sister Maureen earned a bachelor’s degree in education from Trinity College in Washington (now Trinity Washington University) in 1965 and a master’s in art education from the University of Maryland. She became an art teacher and headed the fine arts department at St. Elizabeth High School in Wilmington.

She had retired from teaching and, until being injured in an automobile accident this year, was living at her order’s Mount Notre Dame campus in Cincinnati, where she was caring for elderly nuns.

In 2003, galvanized by the growing outcry over sexual abuse by priests and the church’s hesitant early response but reluctant to go public, she wrote several letters to The New York Times under the name Sister M. Immaculata Dunn from Valley Forge, Pa., according to Robert Hoatson, a former priest and a member of Catholic Whistleblowers.

(Mr. Hoatson’s disclosure contradicted a correction published by The Times later that year that quoted Catholic officials in Pennsylvania as saying that the letter-writer as named was not a nun.)

One “Sister Immaculata” letter expressed doubt that church leaders had the will to remove priests who were pedophiles or had sexually abused women, including nuns.