Nun Abuse

Today the pope spoke about the exploitation of nuns. Part of the exploitation that was going on was sexual slavery. Stories about women being kept in what amounted to captivity for sex and then forced to have abortions. Women who presumably had gone into a convent out of deep religious devotion only to be confronted with the truth about organized religion and the men who run it. 

I can't say this comes as a total surprise. The video is only about the menial labor that nuns are forced to do without pay, acting as domestics for priests and bishops. The sexual abuse is another part of it. There had been rumors since the medieval age about convents so debauched that the church had to shut them down. Later in the Victorian age there was an anti-catholic movement which led to some lurid stories of convents being used as brothels by the priests and secret tunnels between the seminary and the convent. Maria Monk wrote one such book, although it seemed that she had a ghost-writer and anti-catholic propagandist in the form of her legal guardian, but neither of them had ever been inside the convent that she purported to write about.

Fictionalized Engraving of Maria Monk and Baby

In her story when babies resulted of the sexual contact between nuns and priests, every baby was baptized before it was drowned and thrown into a lime pit to destroy the evidence. At the time it was a hoax. The anti-catholic propagandists were just guessing, and they really had no idea whether it was true or not. As long as people believed it and hated Catholics, they didn't care if it was true. It turns out they were a lot closer to the truth than even they themselves could have imagined. The news articles about this newly exposed truth say that nuns were subjected to this treatment for years. Probably closer to the truth to say centuries. 

Jeanne de Montbaston, Manuscript Page from the Roman de la Rose, Showing a Nun Harvesting Phalluses from a Phallus Tree and Monk and Nun Embracing, Mid-14th century, Bibliothèque Nationale de France

One could go on at length about the many crimes of the Catholic church, from preying on children to preying on women to preying on girls unfortunate enough to have been handed over to them for getting pregnant or simply being seen as promiscuous. God only knows how many women and children have been fed to the church like this. When girls did get pregnant, they'd put them in Magdalene Houses and extract labor from them. Prison without hope of release. Forced labor. A life sentence. And they sold the babies. A few years ago there was a scandalous discovery that in Spain with the consent of the Franco regime the Catholic maternity hospitals had been pressuring women into giving up their newborns because they weren't married, or lying to them and telling them that their babies had been born dead, with a dead baby kept on ice to be shown to the woman if she insisted hard enough on seeing her baby's body. They'd then put the stolen babies up for adoption with well-off but childless Catholic couples who'd pay a fee for the adoption. They ran children's homes and schools and orphanages, and in all of them there were stories of horrific physical and sexual and spiritual abuse. Sometimes the abuse escalated to murder and an unmarked grave.

The anti-catholic movements of the past were mostly politically motivated in America because Italians and Irish immigrants and Hispanics were all Catholic. It was xenophobia and anti-immigrant sentiment. In England it was the product of a mutual ancestral hatred between England and Ireland, because Ireland had never accepted English rule or the Church of England. It wasn't based on religion per-se. What is happening now is different. This is based on the testimony of the actual victims of things the Catholic church was doing. There have been convictions and exposed cover-ups. There have been undisclosed settlements on a level which threatens to bankrupt the church, although that seems fair in light of what they've been doing and how long they've been getting away with it. A conservative estimate would put it at at least two centuries based on reports over the years. A more liberal estimate might say it's been going on since the middle ages. The Catholic church was once a monopoly. They controlled what information people had about their own religion. They had power over life and death. They were one of the biggest land-owners in Europe for a long time. The peasants who lived on church land belonged to the church. It's hard to imagine an institution that big and with that much power  in the form of a hierarchy not abusing it in exactly the ways in which they've been exposed as doing it today. 

I just imagine the disillusionment those nuns must have felt upon entering the convent out of devout religious belief only to find out that it was even worse on the inside than it was on the outside, that she hadn't avoided any of the awful things that are done to women on a routine basis in the secular world. It is a rare and fortunate girl who arrives at adulthood without experiencing abuse or a profound outrage to her human dignity in the intervening years. And it's all at the hands of those who declare themselves the protectors of women and children. No, that's not true. Some of them don't even make that much of a pretense.