The Other Priest Scandal

By: Allan Wolper Ethics Corner Column

When will the nun stories surface again?

Who will report on the nightmarish tales from Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America, and the United States disclosing how priests raped or seduced nuns, impregnated them, and encouraged some of them to have abortions. What newspaper will turn loose its investigative reporters to track the alleged priestly predators who have been hidden away in the cloistered corners of the Roman Catholic Church?

What TV network newscast will fix its cameras on this scandal involving the violation of so many innocent women who are afraid to speak out publicly and whose families are horrified?

"If those priests had been doctors or lawyers, they would have had to face criminal charges," said Sister Mary Ann Cunningham, who heads the National Coalition of American Nuns, a respected grassroots organization based in Denver. "It was just so cowardly for those priests to pick on those poor young nuns. And the higher-ups who covered up the sins of those priests should be held accountable, too."

Sister Cunningham, waging her war against the predatory priests from a wheelchair, is certain the mainline media's fear of being labeled anti-Catholic has helped the church cover up the sexual abuse of the nuns. "A lot of us don't read the regular newspapers any more because they just aren't doing their jobs," she said. "The only ones willing to go after the truth are those alternative publications."

The National Catholic Reporter, a nonprofit, 45,809-circulation, weekly paper read in 93 countries, alerted the world to the nun scandal with a Page One story on March 16 of last year. The Vatican confirmed that there was a "problem" involving priest-nun relationships, but insisted it was confined to Africa and has since kept its thoughts on the scandal to itself.

But the newspaper's two-year investigation, citing five reports written by several nuns and a priest, traced the abuse of nuns from 1988 to 1998 in 23 countries, including the United States, Italy, Ireland, India, and Brazil. The other countries named in the story were Botswana, Burundi, Colombia, Ghana, Kenya, Lesotho, Malawi, Nigeria, Papua New Guinea, the Philippines, Sierra Leone, South Africa, Tanzania, Tonga, Uganda, Zaire, Zambia, and Zimbabwe.

"When we first broke it, people covered our coverage," said Tom Roberts, editor of the National Catholic Reporter. "Incredibly, the Vatican confirmed it on its Web site. But then it just dropped off the media's radar screen after 9/11." The story was confirmed at numerous private church conferences, but has never been discussed at any public forums, according to Roberts and church sources.

It was this official silence that last fall prompted the National Coalition of American Nuns to ask the Vatican for a public response to the violation of the nuns. "It is evident that silence merely encourages the oppressor and allows the evil to continue unabated," the coalition told the Vatican in a letter released to the press.

That public plea to the Vatican for justice sounded like a reprise of the painful cries for help made over the years by young boys whose sexual abuse at the hands of priests are now filling up the nation's court dockets and news pages.

"We did a lot of reporting to substantiate the reports we had," said Roberts. "We interviewed dozens of nuns, and what we learned was that people were hurt in significant ways and in significant numbers." But the small weekly in Kansas City, Mo., doesn't have the resources to track down the stories in this country and on this continent that would win back American media interest in the abuse of the nuns.

"Even we couldn't find any religious superiors who would give us any information on what happened in the United States," said Roberts. "That is not unusual. The nuns don't want to hurt the church. Some of them might still be working for the priests who assaulted them."

The European media picked up the story, but did nothing to advance it. "Journalists I've spoken with in Europe tell me that they don't have the kind of press or judicial system to push these kind of issues," Roberts said. "And so the story has died."

The National Catholic Reporter investigation by John L. Allen Jr. and Pamela Schaeffer disclosed that nuns in Africa were targeted by priests worried about the AIDS epidemic ravaging the continent.

To this day, the Vatican has refused to identify any of the predatory priests and won't say if any of them has been disciplined, defrocked, or charged with a crime. It is a position that has distressed at least one church leader.

The Rev. Nokter Wolf, a Benedictine abbot, said the desecration of the nuns cited in the various reports was a problem wider than some church leaders would like to think. "How much it happens, what the numbers are, I have no way of knowing," Wolf told the National Catholic Reporter. "But it is a serious matter, and we need to discuss it."