JOHANNESBURG (SOUTH AFRICA)
The Stream/Daily Caller Foundation [Washington D.C.]
June 12, 2025
By Jules Gomes
A Zambian nun is calling out the pervasive sexual abuse of nuns by priests in Africa and drawing attention to the fate of nuns who are expelled from their orders when they become pregnant from it.
Sister Linah Siabana, a mental health specialist, denounced the “systemic abuse” of nuns “particularly at the hands of male clerics” in her May 24 address to the Symposium and Annual General Meeting of the Conference of Major Superiors of Africa and Madagascar.
Siabana’s alert follows multiple revelations of the clerical sex abuse of nuns from high-profile religious sisters. At the COMSAM assembly in South Africa, Siabana, a member of the Missionary Sisters of Our Lady of Africa who serves displaced South Sudanese communities in Uganda’s Arua diocese, narrated harrowing accounts of nuns who have been abused by priests or fellow sisters.
Abused Sisters Getting Pregnant
“At times, we just get to know about that when a sister is pregnant. She will be asked to leave the congregation even without finding out how she became pregnant,” Siabana said. “Do we even ask if the person who impregnated her is a priest?
“There is a case where a sister was abusing a fellow sister,” she added. “The abused sister went through a lot of trauma and attempted to commit suicide three times, because she had lost the sense of being religious, of being human. She felt dirty and felt that whoever looked at her was seeing what she had done.”
Siabana cited the case of a sister formator who was abusing sisters-in-formation for over 10 years. The victims might later become victimizers when they are promoted to levels of authority in the same congregation, she said.
“It is not only the priests that are a threat to us but even in the convents the young people are fearing for their lives,” she warned, noting that sisters undergoing training are being told that if they don’t submit to sexual abuse, they will not be permitted to make their first vows.
The nun also discussed a sister helping the priest in the sacristy who was being abused.
The priest “touches her where he is not supposed to touch her,” but when she complains to her superiors, she is told: “We have worked with this priest for a long time and nothing of that nature has happened.” The superiors blame the nun, saying: “You are the one who has been following Father X.”
Grave Consequences for Nuns
Priests particularly prey upon sisters in need of financial assistance, especially when they are required to support themselves in higher education, Siabana noted.
Addressing the priests at the conference directly, she said, “Brothers, I’m sorry I call you our support system, but it’s a support system that comes with consequences. The consequences are that we pay double. Instead of you helping me as your sister, you are helping me with benefits attached to that, and because of the help that I’ve received from you, I become vulnerable.”
The sexual abuse of nuns has physical, psychological, and spiritual consequences, including “unwanted pregnancies,” anxiety, depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, and the loss of trust in priests, Siabana explained.
“When some of the sisters who have been abused go to church, they prefer not to receive communion from a priest but from a laywoman or any other person apart from a male figure because it reminds them of what has happened to them, even if it is not that very person who abused them,” she noted. “We have a whole network that keeps quiet.”
Research Corroborates Findings on Clerical Sex Abuse
Though more data is needed on Africa’s problem with the sexual abuse of nuns, Siabana commended the research done by Sr. Mary Lembo, a lecturer in anthropology at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome.
In multiple interviews with French media in October 2022, Lembo, who is from Togo, spoke of the magnitude of the “rape, attacks, and unwanted pregnancies” on nuns and its “possible systemic aspect” in Africa.
Lembo’s doctoral thesis is titled Religieuses Abusées en Afrique. Faire la Vérité (Abused Religious in Africa: Telling the Truth). She explains how a culture of extreme deference to the priest in sub-Saharan African society leads nuns to submit to whatever the priest demands “out of fear of God and out of fear of the priest who speaks in the name of God.”
“What he asks, the sisters do,” Lembo said. “The priest is a person of reference, a sage, a leader. He is the man of God, feared and respected.
“Most often, the bishops support the priests. The laity spy on the movements of the nun; they know and say nothing. No one dares to say anything about the priest. In some communities, the superiors are not able to handle these situations.”
Lembo interviewed a former nun she identified only as “Becky,” who was raped several times by a priest she was working with. He prevented her from using contraception and forced her to have an abortion several times. Finally, Becky left religious life.
Lesbian Sexual Abuse of Sisters
Siabana noted that there is “historical evidence” of the widespread “emotional, physical, or sexual abuse” of nuns by priests in century reports throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but these accounts often lacked “the extensive corroborative evidence and rigorous documentation necessary for a complete understanding of the scope of the problem.”
In 2015, historian Hubert Wolf published a book titled The Nuns of Sant’Ambrogio: The True Story of a Convent in Scandal, recounting the story of Sr. Maria Luisa, a 26-year-old novice mistress who used her position to impose lesbian initiation rites on every nun entering the convent.
Novices who were ashamed were told that the devil had assumed Luisa’s shape to discredit her. Those who protested often fell mysteriously ill, and many died.
Wolf’s book triggered a scandal at the highest levels for revealing that Pope Pius XI lifted all ecclesiastical censures against Fr. Joseph Kleutgen in 1870 (also known as Fr. Giuseppe Peters), a Jesuit theologian who frequently spent entire nights with Luisa in her cell.
Kleutgen became one of the key experts at Vatican 1 and innovated the novel doctrine of the “ordinary magisterium,” which would compel Catholics to accept as binding not only the solemn decrees of popes and councils, but also the routine teaching of the pope and the bishops.
Vatican Aware of Predatory Priests Who Abuse Nuns
In February 2019, L’Osservatore Romano, the Vatican’s official journal, featured an article on the abuse of nuns in its monthly magazine, Donne Chiesa Mondo (Women Church World).
The nuns said they had not reported the priests who molested or raped them out of fear of retaliation against them or their congregations. A few days later, in response to a question from the media, Pope Francis publicly acknowledged the problem of clergy sexually abusing nuns.
In 1994, Irish nun Maura O’Donohue submitted a confidential report to the Vatican providing evidence on priests’ abuse of nuns across five continents in 23 countries, including Botswana, Burundi, Brazil, Colombia, Ghana, India, Ireland, Italy, Kenya, Lesotho, Malawi, Nigeria, Philippines, South Africa, Sierra Leone, Uganda, Tanzania, the U.S., Zambia, and Zaire.
Dr. Doris Reisinger, a former nun who was raped by a priest while she was serving in the church, has been at the forefront of the #NunsToo movement. According to a study Reisinger authored in 2022, a significant number of priests who prey upon vulnerable women are forcing the victims they impregnate to abort their children.
Adolescent girls are the most affected; about one-third of all minor clerical abuse victims are female, and about one-third of them are post-pubescent, the study revealed. The total number of minors forced to abort their babies by clergy is at least in the four-digit range in countries with a population between 70 and 80 million, and in the five-digit range in a country with a larger population like the U.S., Reisinger noted.
Reisinger says that Fr. Hermann Geissler, a member of the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, solicited her for sex in the confessional. Geissler denied the charge but left the CDF in 2019 after the incident became public.
Dr. Jules Gomes (BA, BD, MTh, PhD) has a doctorate in biblical studies from the University of Cambridge. Currently a Vatican-accredited journalist based in Rome, he is the author of five books and several academic articles. Gomes lectured at Catholic and Protestant seminaries and universities and was canon theologian and artistic director at Liverpool Cathedral.