michael barbaro

From The New York Times, I’m Michael Barbaro. This is “The Daily.” Today: The pope is acknowledging for the first time the persistent problem of nuns being sexually assaulted by priests. Why it took the Catholic Church so long to recognize this group of victims. It’s Thursday, February 7.

archived recording (pope francis)

[SPEAKING ITALIAN]

laurie goodstein

So earlier this week, Pope Francis spent three days in the United Arab Emirates.

archived recording (pope francis)

[SPEAKING ITALIAN]

laurie goodstein

A historic trip for a pope — first time a pope had ever been in the Arabian Peninsula.

michael barbaro

Laurie Goodstein has covered the Catholic Church for decades.

laurie goodstein

He celebrated Mass for more than 100,000 Catholics in that country, most of whom are migrant workers from other Catholic countries. It was a very emotional event for them to see the pope.

archived recording (pope francis)

[SPEAKING ITALIAN]

laurie goodstein

The pope also signed a landmark document on relations between Catholics and Muslims, and all in all, it was a successful and historic trip.

archived recording

[SPEAKING ITALIAN]

laurie goodstein

So on the plane back to Rome, it’s traditional for the pope to take questions from the press corps traveling with him, and it’s kind of open mic. It’s whatever the reporters want to ask. And this pope is very game. He will talk at length with reporters, if he is feeling peppy enough. And this time, he got a question that had nothing to do with the trip he had just made. It was from a reporter for the Associated Press, their Vatican correspondent, Nicole Winfield. She asked him about reports that had been made last week in a Vatican magazine that nuns were being abused by priests and even by bishops.

archived recording (pope francis)

[SPEAKING ITALIAN]

laurie goodstein

He said, it’s true. In the church, there have been some clerics, and in some cultures a little more strongly than others. It’s not that everyone does this, he said.

archived recording (pope francis)

[SPEAKING ITALIAN]

laurie goodstein

But there have been priests and bishops who have done this.

archived recording (pope francis)

[SPEAKING ITALIAN]

michael barbaro

So here is the pope saying on the record that members of the clergy are sexually abusing nuns.

laurie goodstein

That’s right.

michael barbaro

And what did you think, as someone who’s covered the Catholic Church for more than a quarter of a century, when you heard that?

laurie goodstein

Well, I was stunned at how open he was responding to this question. The issue of nuns being abused, being sexually abused by priests and bishops, is something that has percolated at a very low boil for a very long time.

michael barbaro

How long?

laurie goodstein

I first came across this problem reading a report in the National Catholic Reporter in 2001. They had gotten hold of documents that had been prepared by church officials talking about the problem of sexual abuse of nuns by priests. And it got my attention, because it was focused on Africa, and in particular, the problem of priests who raped nuns during the AIDS epidemic there, the outbreak of the AIDS epidemic. In fact, there’s a report from 1994 by a nun who investigated 23 countries, and she says, for example, “A superior of a community of sisters in one country was approached by priests requesting that sisters would be made available to them for sexual favors. When the superior refused, the priests explained that they would otherwise be obliged to go to the village to find women and might thus get AIDS.” And so what this nun concluded was that sometimes nuns are identified as, quote, “safe,” unquote, targets for sexual activity.

michael barbaro

Who would not be carrying the virus.

laurie goodstein

That’s right. “Safe,” in quotes, because this was not safe for these women who were raped. And they said at the time that it was not just something that went on in Africa, sexual abuse of nuns by priests, but they highlighted the problem on that continent. There were no numbers. There was not an overview of the extent of the problem, but it was the first time I had ever encountered that issue.

michael barbaro

And you said it percolated along for a while. So when was the next time that you heard about it?

laurie goodstein

Probably the next time was just last year. There was a report out of India of a nun who accused a bishop of raping her over several years, and she actually went to the police and made a report, and that’s very unusual. The event ended up splitting her religious order. There were women, other nuns in the religious order, who sided with the bishop. Then there were some nuns who came to her support and signed a letter in her support. And finally the bishop was arrested. But that was only after a lot of pressure. And he’s now facing trial.

michael barbaro

Laurie, why do you think that this has remained under the radar for so long?

laurie goodstein

For so many years, we were consumed with covering another abuse scandal in the church, and that’s the abuse of children by priests. It was so extensive and so shocking and went on for so long. The first case emerged in 1985 in Louisiana. Then you had the Boston scandal in 2001 that then spread all across the United States, and cases are still coming out of the woodwork. People are still coming forward for the first time being willing to talk about what happened to them so long ago. For a Catholic churchgoer who was abused by a priest, it’s very, very hard to come forward. It can take a person well into their 50s, 60s before they’re willing to talk about it. And so if it’s hard for a layperson, imagine what it would be like for a nun.

michael barbaro

What do you mean?

laurie goodstein

For Catholics, the nun is often the public giving face of the church. They know nuns as teachers, maybe as health care workers, as social workers, sometimes professors. But often, the nuns are the Catholic workers who take care of people. But within the church, many nuns tell me they feel like second-class citizens. The priests, who are ordained, are on top. And while the nuns run around and do a lot of the work, and again, are the face of the church to the people, nuns say they often feel subservient to the priests, and in some places, they actually literally are. The Vatican’s women’s magazine — there is a supplement with the Vatican newspaper for women every month — last year came out with a special edition on work, and had an article focused on nuns’ work, and revealed that nuns are doing menial work for bishops and priests. They’re doing their laundry. They are cooking their food, and often unpaid and certainly unsung. This is not everywhere, but this is common enough across the church. So while nuns are often highly educated and don’t see themselves as subservient, that’s often how they are seen by their superiors in the church and by priests.

michael barbaro

So might that explain why it’s taken so long for us to understand what’s been happening to these nuns — because they’re essentially subservient?

laurie goodstein

That’s a part of it. There are factors that face nuns that don’t face laypeople who are not, you know, living and working in the church. For a nun, there is also a fear of retaliation. If a nun goes and tells her mother superior that she’s been abused by the priest — perhaps that’s the priest who comes and celebrates Mass at their convent every day — the mother superior might tell the nun, oh, you should just stay quiet. We can’t risk going public with this. We can’t risk a confrontation with this priest or this bishop. So just let it go. The other thing that happens in the case of nuns is that in some cultures, they are accused of luring the priest into sex. There is an assumption that, you know, it’s the woman who’s guilty. It’s the woman who caused this. So that’s also a huge reason why nuns might not come forward and might just sit with this secret for the rest of their lives. But sometimes, even when they don’t stay quiet, they might report this to their mother superior or a colleague, another nun, who might tell them, you can’t go public about this abuse by a priest or by a bishop, because they hold the purse strings for our religious order. They could cut us off, or they could kick us out of our convent. There are some arrangements in some cultures where the women’s religious order does not have control of their own finances.

michael barbaro

They’re at the mercy of these priests and these bishops that we now know, in some cases, were sexually assaulting these nuns.

laurie goodstein

Sometimes they are. So there’s a fear of retaliation, either personally, that that nun could be thrown out of her religious order and the life she’s always known, or even fear of retaliation against the entire women’s religious community, that she could be putting her own sisters in jeopardy.

michael barbaro

Do you know cases where nuns tried to come forward with accusations and were retaliated against?

laurie goodstein

Only recently, last year in Chile, there was an order of nuns where something like half a dozen of the women reported abuse, and when they tried to report, they were thrown out of the order.

michael barbaro

Wow.

laurie goodstein

The Vatican is looking into that case, but the message to those women initially was, we’re going to retaliate against you, because you spoke out.

michael barbaro

So from everything you’re describing, nuns are subservient in the clergy system, they fear retaliation, and they don’t have a lot of outlets to go around the people who are in power. So that suggests it would be a Herculean task for them to report sexual abuse.

laurie goodstein

That’s right. And nuns are also vulnerable. A lot of them in lot of cultures other than the United States are very young. And the same as with laypeople, they see the priest as an embodiment of Jesus. They might see the priest as a father figure. They might also see the priest as their confessor. He might be their confessor.

michael barbaro

The person to whom they go into a confession booth and describe what their sins are.

laurie goodstein

That’s right. He may also be their spiritual mentor. And so there is a trust and a vulnerability that nuns have as well as these children who were abused by priests.

michael barbaro

It’s kind of painful to think that for the past two decades, maybe even three decades, while the entire world was discovering the abuse of children inside the church and investigating it and bringing charges against the priest, that this entire other sex abuse scandal of nuns went largely unnoticed and kind of undisrupted and unaccounted for at the same time.

laurie goodstein

It is very disturbing, especially since it’s women who were so much a part of church life, but who were being overlooked and whose own pain was being overlooked.

michael barbaro

Laurie, it’s kind of hard not to see all of this, the child sex abuse scandal and the now-emerging sexual assault of nuns, as deeply connected and very revealing about a larger set of problems inside the Catholic church. And I wonder what you think those are.

laurie goodstein

The pope talks a lot about that the problem is clericalism. The problem is putting the priest on a pedestal and not treating the priest as a human being, seeing him as some superhuman figure who can do no wrong. I think the bigger picture is the sexual secrets in the church. This is a church in which the clergy are supposed to be chaste and celibate. They are, in some ways, set apart from the rest of human beings. This is a vow they take. But as many priests will admit, this is a very hard life to live. Some do live it, but many do not. I have written about priests who had illicit sexual relationships with laywomen. This was not abuse, but priests who had relationships with laywomen, and those kind of violations become secrets. It is not something that’s supposed to be discussed. Abuse of children, abuse of women, sexual abuse is different than a sexual relationship. And yet, all these things go on in the church among the clergy, and they’re all connected. Because if a bishop is living a secret life, maybe one of his priests knows about that, but the priest won’t speak about the bishop, because maybe the priest is living some kind of a secret life. And so there are layers upon layers of secrets.

michael barbaro

And one may be far worse than the other, but everyone is bound by the vow of celibacy and doesn’t want to be outed as having violated it, so they’re all keeping each other’s secrets? Is that the idea?

laurie goodstein

That’s what’s been portrayed by people who study sexuality in the clergy. When you have an ideal that many of these priests believe in and want to live by, but many of them can’t, and you have people living double lives, that contributes to a kind of — sexual secrets and hypocrisy that is quite widespread, from what I am told. Here’s a scenario I have heard about often enough. The bishop has a very close friend who is more than a close friend, and it could be a priest. It could be a layman. It could be a woman. And one of his priests is accused of child sexual abuse. Well, those two have secrets on one another.

michael barbaro

Right.

laurie goodstein

And so they protect one another. That’s the scenario I have heard about over and over again.

michael barbaro

And if you are a nun, and you’ve been sexually abused by a priest, you would fit, unfortunately, into this system of secrets and kind of blackmail and hypocrisy.

laurie goodstein

A priest might not tell on another priest whom they know is having sex with nuns or who is even sexually abusing nuns.

michael barbaro

And given that no one is motivated to come forward, the priests who have their own secrets keeping other priests’ secrets, nuns who have many obstacles to go public — it’s hard to see how any of this would change.

laurie goodstein

That’s why, in some ways, the pope’s acknowledgment is so extraordinary, because he not only admitted that it’s a problem, but he said it’s an ongoing problem, and he said it’s something that the church is paying attention to.

michael barbaro

So what do you think that the pope’s goal was in acknowledging this history if there’s no real plan to change this issue that’s at the center of all this and the dilemma of how to solve it, which it feels like is celibacy?

laurie goodstein

What I think is that it’s an issue he can no longer ignore. It’s out in the open. Only recently, a top official at the Vatican was forced to resign because a former nun came forward and said he had sexually abused her. Now, he says it’s not true, and he’s going to fight the case. But he was forced to resign, and this was public, in Rome. The Vatican’s own magazine just wrote an article about this problem. It’s not something he can honestly claim isn’t true. And answering the question on the plane, he said not only have they been working on it for some time, but he said, we have suspended a few clerics and sent some away over this, over abuse of nuns.

michael barbaro

So the church has, very quietly, gotten rid of priests, who have had sexual relationships with nuns.

laurie goodstein

The pope is acknowledging that for the first time in this answer on the plane. He said, I think that the problem is continuing, because it’s not like once you realize it, it stops. It continues. And he says, should something more be done? Yes. Do we have the will? Yes. But it’s a path that we’ve been on for some time.

michael barbaro

So now that he has acknowledged this and said that the church has very quietly gotten rid of some priests who may have been involved in this, what do you think the church will do more broadly to acknowledge this and to address it?

laurie goodstein

In a few weeks, the Vatican is having a meeting on sexual abuse of children and minors, primarily, but they also do talk about abuse of vulnerable adults. And that came up last year when an American cardinal was accused of abusing seminary students and young priests. There have also been cases where priests abused disabled adults, and that’s why they use that term, vulnerable adults. We’ll see whether nuns fit under that rubric as vulnerable adults, or to what extent the topic of abuse of nuns comes up in this meeting in a couple weeks.

michael barbaro

And if this meeting that’s happening in Rome is taking place two decades after the childhood sex abuse scandals first came to light, what does that say, do you think, about how long the church will be dealing with the abuse of nuns, which the pope just acknowledged for the first time this week?

laurie goodstein

It could be a very long time before the church really confronts this, but it’s now on the table, and it will be hard to ignore.

michael barbaro

Laurie, thank you very much.

laurie goodstein