Since the first scandals broke in the mid-1980s, the sexual misconducts of priests have cost the Catholic Church in America more than $4 billion in compensation settlements and incalculable damage to its reputation. Although their crimes have attracted far less attention, predatory nuns have also caused harm. The depredations of these nuns 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 six-year-olds to young adults. This book focuses on the criminal behavior of North American nuns and the responses from church leadership. Mothers superior were outspoken in their refusal to accept responsibility for the crimes committed under their watch, and their inclination was to close ranks and protect the predators, endangering many children and young people in the process. The complainants, on the other hand, were considered nuisances to be pushed aside with the least amount of exposure and expense possible. Straightforward and informative, this text begins by exploring the nuns' vow of chastity and its relationship with human sexuality, followed by dozens of case studies detailing the sexual abuse that nuns committed in various settings.

Since the first scandals broke in the mid-1980s, the sexual misconducts of priests have cost the Catholic Church in America more than $4 billion in compensation settlements and incalculable damage to its reputation. Although their crimes have attracted far less attention, predatory nuns have also caused harm. The depredations of these nuns 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 six-year-olds to young adults. This book focuses on the criminal behavior of North American nuns and the responses from church leadership. Mothers superior were outspoken in their refusal to accept responsibility for the crimes committed under their watch, and their inclination was to close ranks and protect the predators, endangering many children and young people in the process. The complainants, on the other hand, were considered nuisances to be pushed aside with the least amount of exposure and expense possible. Straightforward and informative, this text begins by exploring the nuns' vow of chastity and its relationship with human sexuality, followed by dozens of case studies detailing the sexual abuse that nuns committed in various settings.

The story presents the sequence of events that leads to sexual abuse of the author. It is an autobiographical account of Pauline’s childhood, entrance to the convent, and her profession of vows. She describes her teaching experiences and the effects of the abuse.

The relentless crescendo of revelations of sexual abuse in the nation's Catholic churches has rocked the nation. Just how widespread is child sexual abuse by the Catholic clergy? And why hasn't the Catholic church done more to stop it?In A Gospel of Shame, Pulitzer Prize-nominated journalists Elinor Burkett and Frank Bruni provide the answers to these questions and more. The answers, however, turn out to be infuriating and heartbreaking, difficult to accept but impossible to dismiss. The authors thoroughly document dozens of cases across the country and reveal how this heinous abuse of trust has been tacitly sanctioned by the Church's silence.

A true, never-before-told story—discovered in a secret Vatican archive—of sex, poison, and lesbian initiation rites in a nineteenth-century convent. In 1858, a German princess, recently inducted into the convent of Sant’Ambrogio in Rome, wrote a frantic letter to her cousin, a confidant of the Pope, claiming that she was being abused and feared for her life. What the subsequent investigation by the Church’s Inquisition uncovered were the extraordinary secrets of Sant’Ambrogio and the illicit behavior of the convent’s beautiful young mistress, Maria Luisa. Having convinced those under her charge that she was having regular visions and heavenly visitations, Maria Luisa began to lead and coerce her novices into lesbian initiation rites and heresies. She entered into a highly eroticized relationship with a young theologian known as Padre Peters—urging him to dispense upon her, in the privacy and sanctity of the confessional box, what the two of them referred to as the “special blessing.” What emerges through the fog of centuries is a sex scandal of ecclesiastical significance, skillfully brought to light and vividly reconstructed in scholarly detail. Offering a broad historical background on female mystics and the cult of the Virgin Mary, and drawing on written testimony and original documents, Professor Wolf—Germany’s leading scholar of the Catholic Church, and among the very first scholars to be granted access to the archives of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, formerly the office of the Inquisition—tells the incredible story of how one woman was able to perpetrate deception, heresy, seduction, and murder in the heart of the Church itself.

A National Book Foundation "5 Under 35" Honoree “An enchanting, sparkling book about the many meanings of sisterhood.” —Kristin Iversen, Refinery29 Claire Luchette's debut, Agatha of Little Neon, is a novel about yearning and sisterhood, figuring out how you fit in (or don’t), and the unexpected friends who help you find your truest self Agatha has lived every day of the last nine years with her sisters: they work together, laugh together, pray together. Their world is contained within the little house they share. The four of them are devoted to Mother Roberta and to their quiet, purposeful life. But when the parish goes broke, the sisters are forced to move. They land in Woonsocket, a former mill town now dotted with wind turbines. They take over the care of a halfway house, where they live alongside their charges, such as the jawless Tim Gary and the headstrong Lawnmower Jill. Agatha is forced to venture out into the world alone to teach math at a local all-girls high school, where for the first time in years she has to reckon all on her own with what she sees and feels. Who will she be if she isn’t with her sisters? These women, the church, have been her home. Or has she just been hiding? Disarming, delightfully deadpan, and full of searching, Claire Luchette’s Agatha of Little Neon offers a view into the lives of women and the choices they make.

The new edition includes a new foreword that looks at the impact the original edition had on both the lesbian and the mainstream cultures. The authors have added individual afterwords, describing how their lives were changed when their book went mainstream.