Pope Francis’s public admission that priests have used nuns as “sexual slaves” and may still be doing so marks a new chapter in the abuse crisis rocking the Catholic Church.
The pontiff on Tuesday said Catholic priests and bishops had been sexually abusing nuns, and that his predecessor Benedict XVI had dissolved a religious order of women because of “sexual slavery on the part of priests and the founder”.
The nuns’ scandal broke as the Catholic Church has had to contend with a wave of cases involving paedophile priests in countries worldwide from Ireland and the United States to Australia.
The papal admission followed a rare outcry last week from the Vatican’s women’s magazine, ‘Women Church World’, over the rape of nuns, leaving them feeling forced to have abortions or raise children not recognised by their priest fathers.
“They could move quickly with trials, and above all raise awareness because silence is what allows rapists to continue to rape,” she added.
“It’s a very difficult situation which has its roots in the nuns’ dependence within the church. They are not recognised as equals.” The congregation of nuns dissolved under Benedict was the Sisters Mariales d’Israel, a spokesman for the parent order said.
Francis said Benedict had attempted to look into the order before he become pope. As Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, he had headed the Vatican department that investigates sexual abuse, but his efforts had been “blocked”. The Argentine pontiff also alluded to an ongoing investigation into another community, without naming it, but believed to be the Community of St. Jean in France.
That community admitted in 2013 that the priest who founded it had behaved “in ways that went against chastity” with several women in the order, according to French Catholic newspaper La Croix.
Francis’s admission of the problem was “the umpteenth blow to the church’s image, but also an occasion to show that change really is underway”, Scaraffia said.
