Professor Emeritus
Predatory Nuns: Sexual Abuse in North American Catholic Sisterhoods
(2022)
Publisher’s Notes
Predatory Nuns: Sexual Abuse in North American Catholic Sisterhoods
Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2022
Since its emergence in the mid-1980s, the sexual predator priest scandal has cost the Catholic Church in America more than $4 billion in compensation settlements and incalculable damage to its reputation. Predatory nuns were a problem too although their crimes have received little attention. Their depredations took place in convent novitiates, orphanages, boarding schools for Native Americans, and in Catholic schools, both elementary and secondary. Their victims, male and female, ranged in age from young adults to six-year-olds.
In this book, secular historian Brian Titley examines the criminal behavior of North American nuns and how religious sisterhood leaders responded to it. Mothers superior were loud in their refusal to accept responsibility for the crimes committed under their watch. Their instinct was to close ranks to protect the sexual predators and in doing so endangered countless children and young people. As for the complainants, they were treated as a nuisance to be brushed aside with a minimum publicity and expense.
This is the first major study of the Church’s latest sex scandal and presents a strikingly different image of convent culture from that depicted by Catholic historians.
Reviews
“Although Catholic reverence for the virginal nun is an important factor, it is not the only reason that this book is unprecedented. Feminist scholars have long described
women as hidden from history. What is frequently forgotten, however, is how
the oft-lamented tendency to overlook women may have benefitted them historically.
If rates of female criminality have traditionally been lower than male, much of this
probably has to do with the underreporting of women’s crimes — a pattern apparent
in both ecclesiastical and secular society. When Titley addresses this issue in his
conclusion, he makes reference to a widespread tendency among the public to regard
female sexual abusers as less damaging to children than male sexual abusers.
This book is an important corrective to any such exculpatory propensity. Predatory
Nuns demonstrates that enforced celibacy, compounded with an inflated sense of holiness,
is every bit as corrosive in women as in men, and that nuns are capable of being
every bit as monstrous as the clergy, perhaps even more so.”
-Dyan Elliott, Historical Studies in Education, Fall 2022.
“The background is the emergence in the mid-1980s of the sexual predator priest scandal.
Titley highlights the existence of predatory nuns and sisters also. Committed in novitiates,
orphanages, and boarding schools, their crimes have received little attention. In the book,
he examines the criminal behaviour itself and how religious authorities responded to it, refusing
to accept responsibility for actions in question, closing ranks to protect their peers, and
seeking to humiliate those who made complaints. Carefully researched, thoughtfully considered,
and written in a crisp, economic, and fast-moving style that vividly brings to life
dozens of case studies detailing the sexual abuse committed by female religious, we are
brought face-to-face with how the Church exploited the legal system to prevent off enders
being brought to justice. ”
-Tom O’Donoghue, Irish Educational Studies, February 2023.
