ROME (ITALY)
National Public Radio
March 18, 2019
By Sylvia Poggioli
In February, Pope Francis acknowledged a longstanding dirty secret in the Roman Catholic Church — the sexual abuse of nuns by priests.
It’s an issue that had long been kept under wraps, but in the #MeToo era, a #NunsToo movement has emerged, and now sexual abuse is more widely discussed.
The Vatican’s wall of silence was first broken in Women Church World, a supplement of the official Vatican daily, L’Osservatore Romano. An article in the February issue by editor Lucetta Scaraffia — a history professor, mother and feminist — blamed abuse of women and minors on the clerical culture of the all-powerful priesthood. The piece was based on hundreds of stories she heard from nuns.
It’s very hard for a nun to report she has been raped by a priest, says Scaraffia, because of the mindset that, in sex, women can always say no.
“These nuns believe they’re the guilty ones for having seduced that holy man into committing sin,” she says, “because that’s what they’ve always been taught.”
Adding to the trauma, she says, raped nuns who get pregnant become outcasts from their orders.
“These poor women are forced to leave their order and live alone raising their child with no help,” she says. “Sometimes they’re forced to have abortions — paid by the priest because nuns have no money.”
“We are unobserved, invisible, ignored and not respected”
Sister Catherine Aubin, a French Dominican nun who teaches theology at the Pontifical University of St. Thomas in Rome, says the abuse is the result of male domination in church leadership.
“The Vatican is a world of men,” she says. “Some truly are men of God. Others have been ruined by power. The key to these secrets and silence is … abuse of power. They climb up a career staircase toward evil.”
Aubin, who also works on Women Church World, describes women’s treatment inside the male Vatican world this way: “We are unobserved, invisible, ignored and not respected.”
The first extensive report on abuse of women in the church was in 1994 by an Irish nun, Sister Maura O’Donohue. Her report covered more than 20 countries — mostly in Africa, but also Ireland, Italy, the Philippines and the United States.
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