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 counsel assisting the inquiry Warwick Hunt if that included
''cooking the Sunday lunch roast for priests'', Sister Baker replied:
''Yes, and never being part of any decision making, even any kind of
consultation, collaboration. I'm sure they didn't know the meaning of
the word, really, in those days, the 1980s.
''You know, the Catholic Church is basically patriarchal in its
organisation and its systems. If you know anything about the Catholic
Church and its system, then you know that women are still today fairly
well overlooked.''
The NSW Special Commission of Inquiry, headed by Margaret Cunneen, SC,
is investigating the Catholic Church and police handling of child sex
allegations about the late priests Denis McAlinden and James Fletcher.
Its final report is due later this month.
Sister Baker gave evidence in private at Wallsend on April 19. She
finished her five-year term as congregational leader of the Lochinvar
Josephites last month.
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.''
Sister Baker said nuns were ''even further behind the eight ball'' than
other women in the church because their vows of chastity, obedience and
poverty meant ''many clerics regarded religious women as odd''.
She told the inquiry about a recently completed two-year papal
investigation of nuns in the US. It was ordered because of their social
justice work with the very poor and disadvantaged. Josephite nuns in
Australia did similar social justice work with the very poor and the
homeless, she said.
''We work in areas that at times make us work in opposition to the
doctrine of the church, and it's a question of doctrine or people,'' she
said. ''Women choose people over doctrine. Happily so.''
In the 1990s nuns had become ''more enlightened and outspoken, and I think we have claimed more and more of our identity''.
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