AUSTRALIA
Sydney Morning Herald
Joanne McCarthy
The Catholic Church was ”patriarchal”, regarded women as useful for ”cooking the Sunday lunch roast” but not much else and even today left women feeling ”fairly well overlooked”, a senior nun has told the NSW Special Commission of Inquiry.
A former congregation leader of the Sisters of St Joseph in Lochinvar, in the Hunter Valley, Sister Lauretta Baker, said she was not a feminist because the word was divisive, but she laid bare how a nun felt about the church and its global child sex abuse crisis.
”I think it’s true to say the Catholic Church is as good as it is today because of its religious women, not because of its religious men,” she told the inquiry in evidence made public on Friday. ”We have endured much, put up with much.”
In the 1980s, when child sex allegations emerged in the US, the church had ”little regard for women in general, whom they saw as doing the flowers in the church, washing the altar linen, etc, etc”, she said. …
Asked by Mr Hunt if she had any views about systemic obstacles in the past facing nuns or their superiors who had knowledge or suspicions about clerics ”misbehaving with children”, she replied: ”Yes, I do. Have you got all day?
”The major superiors that I knew in the 1980s would have to have been extremely courageous women to have approached the bishop. Nobody believed that a priest in such a position of trust would act like that, act in a way that we’ve seen some of them did.
”They [bishops] wouldn’t have believed it, to start with. My conjecture is that they [nuns] would have been patted on the head and ignored.”
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