Church in
Crisis
Women religious address abuse within their ranks
By GILL DONOVAN
Although incidents of abuse of minors by religious sisters are
extremely infrequent, nearly all religious congregations have established
policies to deal with allegations when they do arise, the executive director of
the Leadership Conference of Women Religious told NCR.
“To the best of my knowledge, about 99 percent already have
established policies about abuse and have been updating them,” School
Sister of Notre Dame Carole Shinnick said.
The sexual abuse crisis in the church first began making national
headlines in January. Since then, Shinnick said, many of the congregations have
closely scrutinized their policies, and have received help in their revisions
from canon lawyers made available to them from the Legal Resource Center for
Religious in Silver Spring, Md.
Because the leadership conference, commonly called LCWR, is not a
governing body, it has not attempted to draw up a document similar to the
“Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People” approved by
the U.S. bishops in Dallas last June, she said. So when Shinnick read a letter
Aug. 17 from Myra Hidalgo, a victim of child sexual abuse by a nun, asking that
the conference develop comprehensive sex abuse policies at its annual assembly
that began that very day in St. Louis, Shinnick told NCR that Hidalgo
was assuming the conference had jurisdiction over its members that it has never
had.
The letter to Shinnick, copied to NCR by Hidalgo, said,
“I believe that the LCWR now has an opportunity and an obligation to
prevent further abuse of children and vulnerable adults by women religious
through a combined effort to educate the lay and religious communities on
issues of sexuality, boundaries, and professional expectations for behavior and
to develop effective and comprehensive policies and procedures for coping with
member misconduct.”
After the assembly was over, Shinnick wrote to Hidalgo to say that
the conference didn’t have the authority to create the sort of
comprehensive policy she’d called for.
However, Shinnick told NCR, the sisters who attended the
assembly in St. Louis did discuss the crisis. “We provided the resources
to have the conversation,” she said. That conversation led to a written
statement, which the conference published as a full-page paid advertisement in
NCR Sept. 20:
“We are outraged by the harm done to anyone, especially
children, abused by Catholic clergy, brothers or sisters,” the statement
said. “We ask the members of LCWR to do all within their power to assure
that such harm will never recur.”
While Shinnick said the conference does not know how many women
religious have faced credible charges of sexual abuse of minors, the research
of one of its former presidents sheds some light on the question.
Adrian Dominican Sr. Donna Markham, a psychologist, now serves as
chief executive officer and president of the Southdown Institute, a psychiatric
center in Ontario, Canada, that has for years treated troubled priests and
members of religious communities. In what Markham calls “a modest
study,” she has reviewed the clinical data of “hundreds of women
religious treated for emotional disorders” over a period of nine years,
and found that only .7 percent had sexually abused a minor.
While Markham was unavailable for comment on this story, she wrote
in a short report called “Some Facts about Women Religious and Child
Abuse,” made available to NCR by the leadership conference:
“It is important to note that this is not a random sample of all
religious. In that case, the percentages are likely to be even
smaller.”
Gill Donovan is an NCR writer. His e-mail address is
gdonovan@natcath.org
National Catholic Reporter, November 01,
2002
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