Nuns Hope Abuse Scandal Brings Extensive Reform

NEWTON, Mass. —  The pictures from Rome filled Sister Marie LaBollita with fury. All those white-haired men in red vestments, but not one victim of clerical sexual abuse. Not a single family member to attest to the toll of sexual violation. Not one expert on pedophilia.

Not one woman.

“It’s a disgrace,” said LaBollita, who watched the Vatican gathering of America’s cardinals last week from her office at Our Lady Help of Christians Catholic church in Newton. “I’m outraged.”

Far from a feminist firebrand, this 41-year veteran of the Sisters of Charity reflects the sense of indignation rising among many of this country’s 76,000 Roman Catholic nuns. For centuries, they stood by in silent servitude while the men ran the shop. Now, with their church roiled by a massive sex abuse scandal, many nuns are voicing anger and a deep sense of betrayal.

Along with thousands of lay Catholics and some in the clergy itself, nuns are calling for a greater and more egalitarian role for women in the church. Nuns have seized on the scandal as an opportunity to question mandatory celibacy for the priesthood--and to urge the church to adopt a more enlightened attitude toward sexuality.

Ranging from teenagers to elderly women and working in diverse capacities, America’s nuns are not a monolithic group. No poll has been taken to generalize their response to the clerical abuse scandal. But the nation’s largest organization of nuns, the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, plans to address the crisis at meetings this week at the Vatican.

For nuns, the moment is pivotal, said Eugene Kennedy, author of “The Unhealed Wound: The Church and Human Sexuality.”

“The American church owes its success to women, the nuns who have sacrificed so heroically,” said Kennedy, a professor emeritus at Loyola University in Chicago. “These women have a clear consciousness that they, as much as the buildings or the bishops, are the church--and they are going to speak out. When that voice speaks, it will speak clearly and loudly.”

For centuries, nuns have served as caregivers: teachers, nurses, midwives and ministers “to those wounded by violence and stripped of hope.” Those very words appeared in the vow LaBollita, 61, took when she joined her order. Since then, Vatican decrees have changed the way nuns live. LaBollita has traded her habit for a red blazer and trim black skirt. She drives her Honda so fast that friends call her “the flying nun.”

Still, the sisters are beholden to an ancient institution dominated by a male hierarchy.

But they see the prospect of revolution. Tragic and troubling as it is, these nuns say, the controversy over sexual misconduct by priests may just open the Vatican gates to long-needed reform.

“I think this constitutes a turning point,” said Chris Schenk, a sister of St. Joseph in Cleveland. “It has energized the nuns. You’re looking at the consequences of a clerical culture that has cultivated secrecy and excluded women. That’s not going to work anymore.”

The church, agreed Joan Chittister, a Benedictine nun who lives in Erie, Pa., cannot continue to stand on its “tripod culture” of “silence, exclusivity and demonization.”

“What has happened in many cases is a crime, a sin. But it is also a symptom of an institutional organization that needs change,” said Chittister, who was rebuked last year by Rome for writing and lecturing on women’s rights in the church.

“What we are seeing is the beginning of reform in the church, not the end by a long shot.”

The biggest changes would be the inclusion of women in church policymaking and the expansion of the Catholic hierarchy to include women.

“It’s got to happen,” Chittister said. “You’ve got to engage the whole church in determining what the church needs.”

When that will happen is another question. At present, Chittister pointed out, “we have no official status whatsoever in the church hierarchy. We will not be called on for this crisis, any more than the laity will be called on.”

(The nuns answer to the heads of their orders, who report to the Vatican. In some cases, nuns also are subject to the authority of local dioceses.)

Many nuns also want an end to secretive practices in the church.

“The structure of the church does not allow for open conversation,” said Sister Nancy Sylvester, a member of the Servants of the Immaculate Heart of Mary and former director of a social justice lobbying group in Washington, D.C. “Secrecy is a tool the leadership uses to maintain power and control over issues of controversy.”

In addition, these nuns are calling for more open discussions about sexual ethics in the church.

“The theology of human sexuality is woefully underdeveloped in the Roman Catholic Church,” said Sister Kathleen Pruitt of Seattle, president of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious. While forbidden to marry, nuns tend to be better educated than priests in the field of human sexuality because their professional training requires it, said Pruitt, a sister of St. Joseph of Peace.

Across the country--in cloisters, provincial offices and on college campuses--nuns are meeting, talking, praying and communicating via the Internet.

They express feelings of intense sadness for sexual abuse victims and their families. But they swiftly take aim at the authority that permitted sexual predators to work in their midst: Catholic officials who they say moved pedophile priests from parish to parish and carefully tried to cover their tracks.

Some nuns feel torn between loyalty to the faith they have pledged their lives to and impatience with an institution rife with anachronisms.

“Women religious struggle with the ambivalent feelings we have sometimes about the church,” said Carole Shinnick, a School Sister of Notre Dame who is executive director of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious in Silver Spring, Md. “But we love the church and see this as a time when something good may come.”

Shinnick, a clinical social worker, summoned Gospel metaphors to illustrate how strength and redemption can come from sorrow and suffering. She recalled studying institutional lags in graduate school--how the populace generally moves faster than its leaders and organizations. And while hopeful, she conceded: “To say Rome moves slowly is an understatement.”

From her Carmelite cloister in Indianapolis, Sister Teresa uses a Web site, praythenews.com, to comment on the pedophilia scandal.

“Sexual abuse is not uncommon in primitive societies,” she said. “But you expect more from the church. It’s hard to accept that the problem was never dealt with.”

Like their parishioners, America’s nuns trusted the church and were shocked to learn how rampant sexual misconduct among priests has been, said Margaret Farley, a Sister of Mercy who teaches ethics at Yale Divinity School and has written extensively on sexual ethics.

“Maybe not as shocked as other people,” Farley acknowledged. “Nuns tend to know the vulnerabilities and weaknesses of priests, more so than other people do.”

But all her years as a teacher and as someone who ministers in times of crisis could not prepare LaBollita for the knot that clenched her stomach early this year.

In the parish women’s group at Our Lady Help of Christians, LaBollita had listened while Paula Ford, a soprano in the choir, talked about problems her son Greg, 24, was experiencing. When she read a Boston Globe article about Father Paul Shanley, a priest accused of pedophilia who served as pastor and taught children’s religious classes at Our Lady, LaBollita shuddered. The phone call from Paula Ford confirmed her fears.

LaBollita embraced Greg Ford after a news conference at which his lawyer displayed church documents that showed the Boston Archdiocese was well aware that Shanley had advocated sex with children. At a court hearing this month at which the Ford family won the right to seek a deposition from Boston’s Cardinal Bernard Law, LaBollita shook lawyer Roderick MacLeish Jr.’s hand and praised him “for doing God’s work.”

She knew that in some official circles of the church, her support of the family and their lawyer might be viewed as insubordination--and she did not care.

“It is all of us women who are the nurturers, and together we have to turn the tide,” LaBollita said. “It is all of our responsibility to move for reform in the church.”

LaBollita turned again to the image of Pope John Paul II and his American cardinals, gathered in Rome to establish church policy on sexual abuse.

“A whole group of men making those decisions?” LaBollita marveled once again. “It is ridiculous.”

Along with her sisters across the country, LaBollita said, she finds herself part of “a revolutionary moment,” a time when “this whole issue of sexual abuse is putting us on a path toward reform. Where it will take us remains to be seen. But I am very hopeful.”