India's Hidden Years of Nuns Abused by Priests

Economic Times
January 29, 2019

https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/politics-and-nation/indias-hidden-years-of-nuns-abused-by-priests/grim-stories/slideshow/67738174.cms

Grim stories

The stories spill out in the sitting rooms of Catholic convents, where portraits of Jesus keep watch and fans spin quietly overhead. They spill out in church meeting halls bathed in fluorescent lights, and over cups of cheap instant coffee in convent kitchens. Always, the stories come haltingly, quietly. Sometimes, the nuns speak at little more than a whisper.

Across India, the nuns talk of priests who pushed into their bedrooms and of priests who pressured them to turn close friendships into sex. They talk about being groped and kissed, of hands pressed against them by men they were raised to believe were representatives of Jesus Christ.

"He was drunk," said one nun, beginning her story. "You don't know how to say no," said another.

Some nuns' accounts date back decades

One sister, barely out of her teens, was teaching in a Catholic school in the early 1990s.

It was exhausting work, and she was looking forward to the chance to reflect on what had led her — happily — to convent life.

"We have kind of a retreat before we renew our vows," she said, sitting in the painfully neat sitting room of her big-city convent, where doilies cover most every surface, chairs are lined up in rows and the blare of horns drifts in through open windows. "We take one week off and we go for prayers and silence."

She had traveled to a New Delhi retreat center, a collection of concrete buildings where she gathered with other young nuns. A priest was there to lead the sisters in reflection.

The nun, who like others interviewed for this story spoke on condition she not be identified, is a strong and forceful woman who has spent years working with India's poor and dispossessed, from battered wives to evicted families.

But when she talks about the retreat her voice grows quiet, as if she's afraid to be overheard in the empty room: "I felt this person, maybe he had some thoughts, some attraction."

He was in his 60s. She was four decades younger

One night, the priest went to a neighborhood party. He came back late, after 9:30 p.m., and knocked at her room.

"'I need to meet you'," he said when she cracked open the door, insisting he wanted to discuss her spiritual life. She could smell the alcohol.

"You're not stable. I'm not ready to meet you," she told him.

But the priest forced open the door. He tried to kiss her. He grabbed at her body, groping wherever he could.

Weeping, she pushed him back enough to slam the door and lock it.

It wasn't rape. She knows it could have been so much worse. But decades later she still reels at the memory, and this tough woman, for a few moments, looks like a scared young girl: "It was such a terrifying experience."

Afterward she quietly told her mother superior, who allowed her to avoid other meetings with the priest. She also wrote an anonymous letter to church officials, which she thinks may have led to the priest being re-assigned.

But nothing was said aloud. There were no public reprimands, no warnings to the many nuns the priest would work with through his long career.

She was too afraid to challenge him openly.

"I couldn't imagine taking that stand. It was too scary," she said. "For me it was risking my own vocation."

So the fierce nun remained silent.