By Tiffany Stanley —
The Associated Press
On Wednesdays, the support group meets via Zoom.
The members talk about their lives, their religious families and their former parish schools.
But above all, they are there to talk about the sexual abuse they suffered at the hands of Catholic nuns.
The issue deserves more attention, they say.
Sexual abuse of minors by Catholic sisters and nuns has been overshadowed by much more common reports of abuse by clerics.
While women in religious orders have also been victims of abuse, they have also been perpetrators.
“We have heard so much about abusive priests and so little about abusive nuns, that it is time to restore balance,” the group's founder, Mary Dispenza, a former nun, said in a speech to abuse survivors last year.
[More than 1,900 minors were abused by hundreds of Catholic religious in Illinois, according to a judicial investigation]
Dispenza, who was abused by both a priest in her childhood and a nun in her former order, started the online support group five years ago with the Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests, or SNAP. English.
Many victims contacted her in the wake of the #MeToo movement, as they re-evaluated past sexual abuse.
Since then, she has seen growing awareness about abusive nuns in former Catholic orphanages and Native American boarding schools.
In a recent lawsuit, Gabrielle Longhi alleges she was sexually abused at Stone Ridge Sacred Heart School in Bethesda, Maryland. Eric Thayer/AP
“The general public would prefer not to consider the fact that religious women rape, abuse and torture children,” Dispenza told The Associated Press.
Women are seen as caregivers, an assumption that is only accentuated by the "spiritual halo" of religious women.
“It's something most of us don't want to consider or really believe,” he added.
New law offers opportunity for justice
Before finding the support group and its roughly 10 members, Gabrielle Longhi had spent years searching for someone with a story like hers, once posting in the comments of the SNAP website: “I have never heard of abuse by of nuns.”
Longhi, now 66 and living in Los Angeles, was a sophomore at Stone Ridge Sacred Heart School in Bethesda, Maryland, when she alleges that a teacher, who was then a Catholic sister in the Society of the Sacred Heart, He sexually abused her in an office.
Unlike most victims of child sexual abuse, she spoke up immediately.
She told other teachers, her sister and her friends that Sister Margaret Daley had tried to sexually abuse Longhi.
Neither her parents nor the police were notified.
Mary Dispenza suffered abuse from both a priest and a nun in her previous order, she started an online support group with the Survivors Network of Abuse by Priests, or SNAP. Kevin P. Casey / AP
“She went into seclusion after that.
She became more closed off,” said her sister, Carol O’Leary, who was then a student at Stone Ridge High School.
The sisters say they were asked to leave the school shortly after.
Longhi always wondered if there were other victims.
Daley, his alleged abuser, left the order in 1980 and died in 2015.
Last year, Longhi learned from another support group member that Maryland was eliminating its civil statute of limitations for victims of child sexual abuse.
After the new law went into effect, Longhi sued his former school and the religious order.
[Prosecutor's Office denounces that the Catholic Church in Illinois hid the names of 500 priests accused of sexual abuse]
Stone Ridge, which has had students of the Kennedy family, and the daughters of other Washington luminaries, sent a letter to its community about the allegations last fall.
The school declined to comment further on the ongoing litigation.
The Society of the Sacred Heart declined to discuss the allegations, but issued a statement saying the order and its schools have implemented strong child protection policies.
"We are deeply saddened," the statement said.
"Our prayers are with everyone involved in this matter and with all survivors of sexual abuse."
Mary Dispenza, a victim of abuse in the Church, looks at her home in Bellevue, Washington, on Saturday, December 2, 2006. Kevin P. Casey / AP
A planned constitutional challenge to the Maryland law is pending, but the policy change “makes all the difference in the world,” Longhi said.
“Before you had no point and now you do.”
"It was abuse. I interpreted it as love"
Paige Eppenstein Anderson is still waiting for her day in court.
Like many members of the group, it took her decades to realize that what happened to her was abuse, and once she did in 2020, at age 40, the statute of limitations on her claim in her home state of Pennsylvania had passed. past.
“It was abuse.
I interpreted it as love,” she said of the sexual relationship he had as a student with a Catholic school teacher, who later joined a religious order.
As a teenager, he spent much of his free time with his teacher.
Their bond was so remarkable that a yearbook entry from a friend of hers called her the woman's “sidekick.”
“It was very confusing for me,” Eppenstein Anderson said.
Anne Gleeson was also almost 40 years old and in therapy before realizing that
she had been sexually abused for years, starting at age 13, by a nun who was 24 years older
than her.
She received compensation from the Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet in 2004.
“The nun brainwashed me into believing we were madly in love,” she said.
“God's love, that's why no one else could know, because it was so special.”
Gleeson, a longtime SNAP activist in St. Louis, had felt that the advocacy group's name, which only mentioned those who suffered abuse by priests, neglected victims like her.
The nun abuse group brought “a great sense of relief,” she said.
Little monitoring of abusive nuns
Few dioceses or religious orders publicly list abusive nuns, a fact the group's members want to change.
The advocacy group Bishop Accountability lists 172 Catholic sisters who have been accused of sexual abuse.
“I feel like it's largely underreported,” said Marya Dantzer, a member of the group that settled her nun abuse case in Michigan in 1996.
Dantzer noted that nuns, especially as teachers, possibly spend more time with young people than priests.
For years, Dispenza and others have been unsuccessfully calling for the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, which represents two-thirds of Catholic sisters in the United States, to allow survivors of nun abuse to speak at its annual meeting.
“We agree with SNAP that religious women must continue to work for the healing of victims and the prevention of further abuse and that hearing directly from survivors is essential,” Sister Annmarie Sanders, LCWR spokesperson, said in an email. .
Sanders added that the LCWR meeting was “not the appropriate place to discuss this issue.”
Instead, victims should contact their abuser's religious order.
Each of the more than 400 women's religious institutes in the United States is relatively autonomous.
In a 2019 speech on Catholic sexual abuse, then-LCWR President Sharlet Wagner acknowledged “that in some cases, our own sisters have been the perpetrators of the abuse.”
That speech followed an apology for abuse by an international organization of Catholic sisters, as well as Pope Francis' creation of an abuse reporting system, which includes nuns.
Members of the support group would like to see the church accept more responsibility and for all religious orders to expel known abusers from their ranks.
Meanwhile, the support group continues to welcome new members, even as others leave.
The majority are women, many of them over 60 years old.
Dispenza recently stopped facilitating the group and Dantzer took over as leader.
After seeing a growing need, Dispenza opened a second group in 2022 that includes international victims of nun abuse, and will focus its efforts there.
Members of the international cohort are contemplating launching nun abuse support groups in Peru and the Balkans.
They have put their contact information on the SNAP website, available to anyone looking for stories like theirs.