VATICAN CITY — Pope Francis must arrange a fund for nuns who stop non secular life after abuse from monks and prelates, activists say, calling for better consideration on a long-neglected subject within the Catholic Church.
There are greater than 600,000 nuns globally, and their exploitation and abuse has come to the fore lately, together with in articles by the Vatican’s official newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano.
Francis acknowledged the issue in 2019. Speaking of a particular girls’s non secular order that was dissolved by his predecessor Benedict XVI in 2005, he talked of circumstances of “slavery” and “even sexual slavery.”
German researcher and former nun Doris Reisinger, herself a sufferer of sexual and non secular abuse by a priest, made the request throughout a press convention on Tuesday organized by abuse monitoring group BishopAccountability.org.
“The pope has admitted abuse of nuns but he has not acted on it,” she mentioned.
“And we have never heard a pope or bishop acknowledge coerced abortion at the hands of priests. They always treat abortion as a female issue yet they have never spoken about priests forcing abortions, despite knowing it is going on,” she added.
The Vatican’s press workplace didn’t instantly reply to a request for remark.
Church regulation ought to be modified to power orders of nuns to put aside cash to assist sisters who stop, Reisinger mentioned. Until they do, the pope ought to create a central Church fund for this objective, she added.
Reisinger urged Francis to additionally arrange a fund for youngsters fathered by monks, to avoid wasting them from “a life of poverty and shame,” and decree the obligatory defrocking of monks who power abortions on girls they impregnate.
She mentioned that nuns who take their vows as youngsters and surrender them as adults usually return to laicized life with no skilled coaching, after years or many years minimize off from family and friends.
“It’s literally impossible to go out there on your own,” she mentioned.
Reisinger mentioned it was laborious to estimate what number of nuns confronted intercourse abuse. She cited a 1998 survey by Saint Louis University within the United States on greater than 1,100 nuns, which discovered that 12.5% of them reported being victims of sexual exploitation.
Just beneath 5% skilled what the research referred to as “genital sexual contact,” together with oral intercourse and sexual activity, whereas greater than 6% reported bodily harassment equivalent to kissing and inappropriate touching. — Reuters
Source: www.gmanetwork.com
