Courageous Conversation: Exploring the Invisible Abuse of Women Religious
Last week Awake hosted a valuable Courageous Conversation focusing on the abuse of religious sisters in the Catholic Church. “Silent Suffering: The Invisible Abuse of Women Religious in the Catholic Church” considered issues that are only just beginning to receive attention in the wider Church.
The speakers included Sr. Mary Lembo, a psychotherapist and instructor at the Safeguarding Institute of the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome, who wrote a groundbreaking dissertation on the sexual abuse of consecrated women by priests in African countries; Anne Barrett Doyle, co-director of Bishop Accountability.org, an extensive archive of information about sexual abuse in the Catholic Church; and Elizabeth Schick, a member of the Awake community and doctoral candidate in theology at Marquette University in Milwaukee, who has personal experience with religious life, having spent some time in a religious community.
Elizabeth Schick
The conversation began with Schick introducing key terms related to the lives of women religious, which provided a framework for understanding their broader experiences and the factors that can make them particularly vulnerable to abuse. For example, Schick mentioned an order’s constitutions, which she described as a document that details how members live out religious life, the order’s governance structures, and its role in the Church. She also explained the evangelical counsels, or the three main vows that women in most religious orders take, the vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. When a woman enters religious life, she is assigned a spiritual director, who guides her spiritual life, and a formator, who helps her transition into life as a member of the order, teaching aspects such as the daily schedule and prayer practices. “According to canon law,” she noted, “formators and spiritual directors must be different people.”
“Religious life is a really beautiful gift of a person’s whole self to Jesus,” Schick added. “It plays this vital role in the Church … and there are a lot of aspects of it that are really good, but there’s also a variety of factors that make religious women more vulnerable to abuse even though they’re adults.”
Here are a few of the main ideas shared during last week’s event.
idea 1: Religious life may leave some vulnerable to manipulation
Sr. Mary Lembo
Lembo offered a summary of her research on the sexual abuse of religious women in African countries, explaining that these women are often abused by priests. The women are often deeply motivated to “live the will of God,” Lembo said. “In this, you are asked to be humble, to be respectful.” Priests often serve as their spiritual directors, but Lembo found that this pastoral relationship may lack professional boundaries, creating opportunities for priests to groom the women, harass them, and pursue unwanted sexual contact, including rape. “And when [the women refuse], they are threatened," she said.
Barrett Doyle offered details about the case of former Jesuit Marko Rupnik, which recently brought the abuse of religious women into the headlines. A well-known religious artist from Slovenia, Rupnik is accused of sexually, spiritually, and psychologically abusing twenty religious women in an order that he co-founded. Barrett Doyle appeared at a February 2024 press conference in Rome with two of Rupnik’s victims who chose to go public with their stories.
One of the victims, Gloria Branciani, “gave an interview and also spoke about the disintegration of self that happens when a naive and earnest young woman or a woman of any age unwittingly entrusts herself to a sexual predator who masquerades as spiritual authority,” Barrett Doyle explained. She then shared some quotes from Branciani, recounting how Rupnik once asked her to pose for one of his paintings. “For me, who was naive and inexperienced, it only meant helping a friend,” Branciani said. “On that occasion, he kissed me lightly on the mouth telling me that this was how he kissed the altar, where he celebrated the Eucharist.”
Both Lembo and Schick highlighted how religious vows can increase the vulnerability of religious women. For instance, Lembo remarked, “The obedience is normally to seek together the will of God, but sometimes it brings a kind of imbalanced way of dealing with authority and power. So there are those who submit to others, and they're not able to say … what they really want. This puts them in a condition like depending too much” on superiors and other people with more power in the community.
Schick echoed this sentiment: “It's supposed to be a mutual discernment between the superior and the religious woman, but in practice it can be nearly impossible for a woman to figure out whether a particular command falls under what can be legitimately asked. And there's a lot of pressure to assume that what's being asked is legitimate and right. So it takes a lot for a woman to say, ‘You know what? I don’t think this is right, and I’m not going to do it.’"
idea 2: Religious women face barriers in reporting and redressing abuse
Religious women face profound challenges in reporting abuse and seeking justice. “In African countries, for example, we are working now to empower the consecrated women to reach out and talk about their abuse because they are the first one not to be listened to, not to be believed,” Lembo said.“They are revictimized because they are accused of doing something to attract the priests [who abused them.]”
Anne Barrett Doyle
Barrett Doyle explained that religious women who choose to report their abuse face disadvantages under canon law. “The offender is protected by excessive due process, and women religious have no status at all,” she said. She advocated for reforms to canon law to “recognize the rights of victims who are impregnated or forced to abort, and then ensure child support for children who are fathered by priests.”
Victim-survivors who choose to leave religious life also face precarious economic circumstances. Schick noted that due to the vow of poverty, the women often lack financial resources, and the order may not help them return to their families of origin. “There are women who have left religious life who aren't accepted back by their family or don't have a family to go back to, who end up … in homeless shelters,” she said. They may have earned a salary while in religious life, but their vow of poverty requires them to contribute their entire income to the community. Schick added, “[F]requently a woman will sign an agreement at the beginning of formation that if she leaves, she won't demand back pay for work that she's done for the order.”
LET’S DISCUSS WHAT WE HEARD. JOIN US!
Don’t miss Part 2 of this Courageous Conversation, 7 pm Central this Thursday, March 27. Attendees will break into small groups on Zoom to discuss the ideas shared by the panelists in Part 1. To join us, please complete the registration for Part 2 and watch the Part 1 video recording. See you Thursday!
idea 3: Reforms are needed
Each panelist offered recommendations to improve the situation of religious women. Barrett Doyle emphasized the need for more independent, academic research to better understand the scope of abuse in religious communities.
Lembo called for Catholic families to do more to educate their children about their sexuality, as well as their dignity and identity. Schick suggested fostering a culture within the Church that emphasizes the universal call to holiness rather than pushing young people to settle on a vocation to a specific state of life. She stressed that religious sisters should be acknowledged as human and fallible. “I think we need to stop putting religious women on pedestals the same way that we need to stop putting priests on pedestals,” she said. Schick also proposed that orders would benefit from independent audits by external bodies, which might allow sisters to speak up anonymously about any harm they have experienced.
Finally, she called for what she called “informed vocational discernment,” including coaching people who are discerning a vocation to religious life to watch for red flags that suggest a community is not healthy, such as the formator and spiritual director roles being held by the same person. And both Schick and Lembo agreed on the importance of increasing transparency within religious communities. For example, they said, women in religious life should have access to their order’s constitution.
As the event closed, Barrett Doyle recommended that audience members check their diocese’s list of credibly accused clergy to determine if it includes people who have abused adults, including women religious. If these cases are not listed, she encouraged Catholics to ask their bishop to do so. She also suggested that when people see news stories about abuse of adults in the Catholic Church, they send a quick note to the reporter to thank them and ask them to continue to follow the story. ”This is how we influence public conversation,” she noted, “and public conversation leads to public pressure, which slowly leads to change in the Church, we hope.”
Schick ended with a call to listen to and believe women in the Catholic Church: “If you hear a story about a religious woman who experienced abuse, even if that abuse occurred in a beloved religious community, believe her.”
—Katie Burke-Redys
