Author: Shi Jiangyue
Sometimes life is truly unpredictable. The same is true for the Catholic nuns of the Vatican.
Agence France-Presse (AFP) broke a shocking scandal about the Vatican on January 25. Religious sources have revealed that some Catholic nuns in the Vatican were forced to leave their monasteries and eventually had to support themselves through prostitution. The Church could privately help them find a shelter in Vatican City and engage in the trade.
Brazilian Cardinal João Braz revealed the existence of this secret sanctuary. In some convents in the Vatican, nuns have been expelled from their monasteries, some of whom have to rely on prostitution to earn enough money to survive. Agence France-Presse's report on the 25th quoted the content of the pre-published February 2020 issue of the Church World Women's Magazine.
The cardinal noted that thanks to the initiative of Pope Francis, nuns who had previously been "completely abandoned" or even left on the streets by the Catholic Church could now finally find shelter.
João Braz spoke of the past experiences of some of the expelled nuns. "The most important example is the establishment of dwellings, by the decision of the Pope, to welcome nuns who have been expelled from the monastery by us or by their superiors and reduced to the streets, especially if they are foreigners".
"These people first entered the monastery as nuns, but eventually they were in this state. Some people even have to rely on prostitution to make ends meet. Still, the cardinal explained, "These are former nuns!"
João Braz added that the specific reasons for the nuns to leave the convent varied: some were forcibly expelled from the monastery because they had made a mistake, while others left the monastery voluntarily for one reason or another (including being subjected to violence), but their identity documents were still withheld by the supervisor.
The pope of the Roman Catholic Church has said he has visited the shelter, which currently seats less than 10 people, and found it to be both a "world of wounds" and a "place of hope."
The shelter has reportedly been open for a year, but the exact location remains unannounced, so it is full of mystery.
According to the National Catholic Newspaper, the number of nuns around the world is declining, leading to the closure of monasteries across Europe, and there are growing scandals of sexual and physical abuse of nuns by priests and their superiors, often in the newspaper media.
In February 2019, In an interview with reporters, Francis publicly admitted that some priests and priests had sexually assaulted nuns and even forced them to have abortions and become sex slaves. This is the first time that a Catholic pope has publicly acknowledged the existence of sexual assault of nuns.
Reports of such news in the public media have long been around. For example, in 2000, a nun dressed in a full robe and clutching a rosary of the Rosary confided to the Associated Press about her experience of sexual harassment at a university in Bologna, Italy.
She confessed to a priest, but the other person suddenly stood up and pasted her. Although the nun was petite but not fragile, she was very surprised and stood up to push the priest back into the chair with all her might. But a year later, she was sexually harassed by another priest. "It opened a huge wound inside me and I could only pretend it never happened," she said. ”
In fact, as early as 1994, the late nun Maura O'Donohue submitted a multi-country investigation report to the Vatican, which pointed out that 29 nuns had been sexually assaulted in an ordinary church alone, and that in Africa, African clergy would be infected with HIV because they feared that they would be infected with HIV from prostitutes or other women, and turned their targets to nuns, because nuns were "safer sexual partners".
By 1998, another nun named Marie McDonald had told Vatican officials and clergy leaders that rape of nuns by African clerics was already common, and that once nuns became pregnant, they would ask them to have an abortion.
Even more surprising is that the problem of sexual assault also exists in the Nuns' Continuing Institute in Rome, because these nuns often seek "help" from seminary students or priests when writing their papers, and providing sexual services is the way they "pass the examination".