Nuns Know Best
There’s a hit new book in the Christian community in India that you might be unaware of. It’s called Amen, Autobiography of a Nun and is the story of Sister Jesme who claims that not only have Indian Catholic priests regularly violated their oath of celibacy by having sexual encounters with each other, they have forced nuns and congregants into sexual activity as well.
The former nun, now 52, alleges that, as a young initiate, she was sexually propositioned in the confessional by a priest who insisted that he be able to perform what he says the Bible terms “divine kisses”. ”At a retreat for novices, I noticed girls in my batch were unsettled about going to the confession chamber. I found that the priest there asked each girl if he could kiss them. I gathered courage and went in. He repeated the question. When I opposed, he quoted from the Bible which spoke of divine kisses.” She was later accosted by a lesbian nun who forced her into a sexual relationship. “She would come to my bed in the night and do lewd acts and I could not stop her.” She traveled to Bangalore and stayed with a priest, supposedly known for his piety, but even there she wasn’t safe. He told her that he needed “physical love” and later sexually assaulted her. “Back in his room, he tried to fondle me and when I resisted, got up and asked angrily if I had seen a man. When I said no, he stripped himself, ejaculated and forced me to strip,” she writes.
But it’s not just the sexual abuse that is apparently rampant in the Indian Catholic Church, it’s the abject corruption as well. “The mental torture was unbearable. When I questioned the church’s stand on self-financing colleges and certain other issues, they accused me of having mental problems. They have even sent me to a psychiatrist. There are many nuns undergoing ill-treatment from the order, but they are afraid of challenging it. The church is a formidable fortress,” she writes.
The church, of course, denies all wrongdoing, but Jesme reports she has been threatened and they attempted to bribe her not to write her book. When that failed, some tried a theological tactic, according to Jesme, “One sister said that she is going to sit in the corner of the chapel and pray the rosary so that all my books will be burnt and no person will be able to read it. I said let us wait and see whose prayer will God hear.”
Dr Paul Thelekkat, spokesman for the Syro-Malabar Catholic church said he sympathizes with the former nun and respects her right to speak out against what she views as wrongdoing, but We’re living with human beings in a community and she should realise this is part of human life.” So… rape is a part of human life and we ought to expect things like this to happen? Is he serious?
So why don’t these stories get told more often? As Jesme writes, “When a woman is molested, sexually harassed, will she speak out? Only one out of a thousand will speak out. So think of nuns! They will never speak out. They fear that their nun-hood will be lost.” Many nuns have nowhere else to go, if they dare speak out against wrongdoing in the church, they fear, and rightfully so, that they will be thrown out into the streets. Others are threatened with violence or, perhaps most despicably, with faith-based terror tactics. If they speak up, God will no longer love them so they’d better keep their mouths shut!
Unfortunately, the Kerala region of India has had it’s fair share of church scandals in recent years. Not long before this book was published, they dealt with the Sister Abhaya murder case where a 19-year old Catholic nun was found dead at a convent, her suspected murderers were two priests and another nun. There are many, many cases we can look at which have led to tragedy, such as:
- In 1995, a priest from the Changanacherry archdiocese entered into a sexual relationship with a 15-year old girl and she bore his child in 1998. He was charged with rape and abduction.
- Sister Anupa Mary, who committed suicide on August 11, 2008, left a sucide note blaming the sexual advances of a senior nun. Church officials refused to investigate the situation, instead entirely denying the allegations.
- In October 2008, a 60-year old nun at the Congregation of Daughters of Mary Convent, Anchal claimed that young nuns were being forced into “limitless affairs” with senior priests and were being forced to have abortions against their will. Another nun, Serenna Jacob, reportedly killed herself because she couldn’t handle the guilt of the situation. This nun is now being held against her will in a mental hospital in Thodupuzha by Convent officials and is not being allowed to see family.
- Not long thereafter, Sister Josephine killed herself on February 11, 2009, again alleging abuse among the other nuns at her convent. Once again, the Church diverted all of the blame to the nun, claiming she had been depressed.
Jesme says she wrote the book because “I wanted an outlet for my trauma. It’ll help me start my second life afresh. The society has the right to know what’s happening to the sisters.” Is this really the tip of the iceberg of priestly sexual abuse or is this something that is limited to a small area in India? Certainly from our examination of the worldwide priest sexual scandals, I don’t think we can say that it’s a limited problem. Like it or not, the Catholics have major problems and major abuses of power. So long as they are allowed to do as they wish and get away with it because of “religious freedom”, we’ll have more nuns dying in shame, more priests raping with wild abandon and the Vatican trying to sweep everything under the rug.
It’s time for this to stop, just like all the other cases in the Religious Horror Show. A civilized society simply cannot allow this to happen to people. Enough is enough!
One Comment to “Nuns Know Best”
This is heartbreaking stuff. It won't end until we stop treating the religious with kid gloves. I believe in religious freedom, but freedom of belief and freedom to practice religion do not entail freedom to violate others. Believe all the batshit stuff you want to believe, burn all the candles you want burn, sing all the chants you want to sing…. Once you cross legal and moral lines, though, you have to be treated like anyone else. Until we apply laws equally to all, this shit will continue.
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