On Wednesdays, the support group meets over Zoom. The members talk about their lives, their religious families and their old parochial schools. But mostly, they are there to talk about the sexual abuse they suffered at the hands of Catholic nuns.
The topic deserves more attention, they say. The sexual abuse of children by Catholic sisters and nuns has been overshadowed by far more common reports of male clergy abuse. Women in religious orders have also been abuse victims — but they have been perpetrators too.
“We’ve heard so much about priests who abuse and so little about nuns who abuse that it’s time to restore the balance,” said the group’s founder, Mary Dispenza, herself a former nun, in a speech to abuse survivors last year.
Dispenza, who endured abuse from both a childhood priest and a nun in her former order, started the online support group five years ago with the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, or SNAP. More victims had been contacting her in the wake of #MeToo, as they reassessed past sexual abuse. She has since seen a growing awareness of abusive nuns at former Catholic orphanages and Native American boarding schools.
I wonder what goes on the minds of the abusers.
One bad day you decide you’re going to commit the rest of your life to God, and reach a compromise to avoid sex forever. Another day, much, much later, you begin having urges, and they get so strong that the idea of abusing a child passes through your mind. If your initial intention of dedicating the rest of your life to God has led you to this point, wouldn’t it be just truer to your initial vocation to renounce your vows so that you can have sex with consenting adults, rather than harming a child?
Then again, the Catholic Church treats abusers better than it treats resigned priests.
Or, you know very early on you’re not like other people, and you have fun with putting on various identities with different people just to see what you can get out of it. Along the way you realize that you enjoy both creating fear and pain, and especially creating that hold over a small child: it seems to feed something dark and delightful in you, but there’s a problem. People protect their kids, and think your desires are monstrous.
Soon whispers abound, and you realize it’s time to move again, but you’re college age now and your options have widened. You don’t really want to have to lug around a spouse (it’s not like you get anything out of long term relationships, and even less out of “standard” sexuality) and you don’t want to be a teacher or a doctor. One day it comes to you: a life in religious orders ticks all the boxes. So you try it out, you sign up as a novice, and shortly after you do you realize that you’re not the only one. Where others called you a monster, here you know for a fact that there are others like you, and all you have to do is play the game and not get caught.
You finish seminary (or your novitiate) and start getting assigned to various parishes. Soon you realize that for many, you can do no wrong: you are literally God’s representative in the flesh. And you realize you have a good sense for both the parents and the children: which are weak, which are vulnerable, which are strong, which won’t abide your games. And as the years roll on, you get really good at both doing what you want and hiding it. You know that there are others that know what you are, but you also know they don’t want the hassle of taking you on, they just don’t want you to do it in their church.
Okay, fine, time to move again. But now you’re middle aged, and you find that your hungers have increased while your available pool of prey have diminished, aging out or losing respect or simply refusing to believe you. Kids are not as easily lured anymore, and parents not as easily intimidated or hushed. Now there’s a complaint – no, three – before your bishop. Time to act again. You put on your best repentance, lying your way out of what you can and putting on an Oscar-worthy show of humble repentance for the once or twice you admit to having “slipped.” The archbishop moves you again.
And again.
And again. Maybe a quiet little stint in “therapy” or “treatment” this time.
And again. The archdiocese had to pay out this time, you’re on shaky ground. Lie. Try to keep your hands clean because now everyone’s paying attention. But still, just one every now and again . . .
Until you are forced to retire, or to die, or by some unforeseen quirk of fate, actually have to ANSWER to your shit, and the lifetimes of misery you heaped upon the helpless for your many light noshes of underage flesh. The church protects you, as it must for its own sake, as you always knew it would. But while it is inconvenient that your name is now publicly known, conscience has always been for others, and you never had that weakness. No hanging of the head in shame for you. Why? You only are what you always were.
A monster among humans.
Source: I grew up related to a dark tetrad molester and the Catholics that protected him. Some of it I saw directly, much of it I watched from a distance as an adult. But this is how I personally saw it work. I wish there were a hell for these beings – I mean, more than the ones they make for themselves – but I don’t believe in any of that shit anymore.
Thanks a lot for the effort put in your message. It’s going to take me a while to process it all.
Yeah, sorry about that. It really is a bit much. But when I went back over it, there was nothing I could take out: that’s pretty much how it went.
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