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Complaints of Sex Abuse by Nuns Begin to Emerge
The pain is strong for accusers just coming to terms with what they say happened to them.
Pamela Miller, Minneapolis Star Tribune
June 25, 2006
Even now, decades later, the victims’ voices falter as they describe the encounters that damaged them in ways they cannot fully cast off.
Mary Dunford tells of a molester visiting her dormitory bed when she was 15. Susan Pavlak speaks of the teacher who talked to her of love, then seduced her at 16. Siblings Christine Bertrand and Karen Britten and their childhood friend Patricia Schwartz describe how their piano teacher touched them in ways no adult should touch a child.
In each case, the perpetrator was, or recently had been, a Roman Catholic nun.
The five women, who said they were abused in the 1950s, '60s and '70s, are among about a dozen Minnesotans and an estimated 400 women and men nationwide who have recently come forward to talk about being sexually abused by nuns.
Last month, Britten, 48, of Highland Park, Ill., and Schwartz, 51, of Eden Prairie, sued the Sisters of St. Francis in Rochester over alleged abuse by a nun in the 1960s. Bertrand, 51, of Sierra Madre, Calif., filed suit against the same nun last year.
Most reports of sexual abuse by nuns have emerged well after the surge of news about abuse by Catholic priests and brothers, and there is little evidence that abuse by nuns has continued. But survivors are increasingly coming forward to seek apologies and reparations.
St. Paul attorney Jeff Anderson, who specializes in clergy sex-abuse cases, said he has received about a dozen plausible reports of abuse by nuns with Minnesota ties.
The issue, Anderson said, “has only been on my radar for a few years. We’re likely to see more cases in the years to come.”
Accusers interviewed for this story say they’ve come forward only recently because it took them years to fully remember or process the abuse and decide how to deal with it.
Sexual abuse by nuns has gone largely unaddressed and unreported until now in part because of cultural biases about gender roles and sex, say those knowledgeable about the cases. Women often abuse in seductive ways that silence and confuse victims, Anderson said.
And when abuse is alleged, it can be difficult for victims to assign accountability in the maze of 450 women’s religious orders. The Catholic Church says it has no jurisdiction over the orders.
But slowly, more victims are telling their stories. The Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP) says it has received as many as 400 reports nationwide of sex abuse by nuns, “which probably just scratches the surface,” said executive director David Clohessy.
Molested at boarding school
Dunford, now 67 and living in Eagan, was molested by a nun at the Villa Maria boarding school in Old Frontenac, Minn., in the early 1950s.
“It happened after lights-out,” she said. “She’d kiss me on the mouth, then take her clothes off down to the waist and have me kiss and suck her nipples. She told me she loved me.”
The experience “has profoundly affected my life,” said Dunford, who graduated in 1956, married Dan Dunford in 1959 and raised three children. She couldn’t talk about it, she said, until age 50, when she realized that the abuse lay at the root of her depression and other problems.
In 1990, she wrote a letter to the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis, which forwarded it to the Ursuline order in Missouri. She was told that the alleged perpetrator was no longer in Minnesota and no longer worked around children, and that an investigation would take place.
When the sister admitted to abusing Dunford, the Ursuline order paid for counseling for both Dunfords – it later also returned her tuition – and in 1997 arranged for the nun to apologize in person, Dunford and the Ursulines say.
“We talked about how what she had done had damaged us,” Mary Dunford said. “When we were done, she said, ‘You weren’t the only one hurt,’ and her provincial [supervisor] turned to her and said, ‘I love you and support you.’ There I was, the victim, and the sympathy was for the perpetrator.”
The sister who molested Dunford continued teaching college students after the order “determined that it was a one-time offense and that there was no threat to others,” said Ursuline Provincial Sister Peggy Moore.
The nun died in 1999.
Since she began telling her story, Dunford said, she has been contacted by more than 200 alleged victims of nun abuse.
A trio of young students
Bertrand and Britten claim to have been molested by Sister Benen Kent during piano lessons in the early 1960s at St. Juliana School in Chicago. In 1965, Kent was transferred to Rochester, where, Bertrand and Schwartz say, she molested them in 1967 during family visits.