AILSA CHANG, HOST:
There are about 2,000 Catholic communities of nuns and religious sisters all around the world. Many of them focus on ministries like education and social justice. Now two Catholic sisters in Kentucky want to start a new order. It would be the first in the church to focus on ministering to people abused by Catholic clergy. This is a complicated task, serving the church by helping people who were hurt by that church. To learn more, reporter Adora Namigadde visited the Sisters of the Little Way of Beauty, Truth and Goodness.
ADORA NAMIGADDE, BYLINE: Sisters Theresa Aletheia and Danielle Lussier are singing through the Divine Office, the liturgy of daily prayers followed by many Catholic nuns.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: (Singing) Hallelujah.
NAMIGADDE: Their heads are covered in teal, waist-length veils. And they're wearing black work aprons with an embroidered image of Jesus on the cross. He's alive and gasping for air.
THERESA ALETHEIA: Which is an important moment for us, when Jesus calls out to the Father, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Because that's the moment that we enter into with the people that we serve.
NAMIGADDE: The people these two sisters serve are survivors of abuse in the Catholic Church.
DANIELLE LUSSIER: Primarily people who have suffered abuse of some kind, whether it be emotional, financial, spiritual or sexual.
NAMIGADDE: The Sisters of the Little Way are the only nuns fully dedicated to serving people who've experienced abuse in the Catholic Church. Now the two sisters want to take their mission one step further by officially starting a new religious order dedicated to helping abuse victims.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: (Singing) Peace to the spirit of the Son.
NAMIGADDE: According to Catholic researchers, there are nearly 2,000 orders of Catholic nuns in the world, though the exact number is hard to know. Some, like the Franciscans, are hundreds of years old. Others are more recent, such as Mother Teresa's Missionaries of Charity. University of Notre Dame historian Kathleen Cummings says religious sisters have dedicated their lives for centuries to helping vulnerable people. They've served everywhere from battlefields to inner city schools.
KATHLEEN CUMMINGS: What we're seeing here is really just a modern manifestation of that, a group of women who recognize a need in the church and want to dedicate their lives to fulfilling it, and to not do that part-time, to make that their entire life.
NAMIGADDE: Sisters Theresa Aletheia and Danielle Lussier say they are meeting a need that no other part of the church does. But starting a new religious order isn't easy.
ALETHEIA: That's the reality of beginning something new. It's very precarious.
LUSSIER: I mean, that's really where the trust and confidence that this is something that God is doing.
NAMIGADDE: The sisters' commitment is born of personal experience. In 2022, they left the Daughters of St. Paul after learning that a priest who had served as a spiritual director for the order had been accused of sexually assaulting one of their sisters. They also suspected he had been grooming them for abuse. After the experience, the sisters say God called them to help others who had experienced harm at the hands of the church.
ALETHEIA: So how do we help the people in church be aware of these patterns without going through the experience of being hurt?
NAMIGADDE: Currently, the two sisters are a private association of the faithful, which is the church's first formal step toward becoming a recognized religious order. How long that journey takes depends on how the community grows over time. Last year, the sisters moved just outside Lexington, Kentucky, where Bishop John Stowe gave the two women permission to set up their mission.
JOHN STOWE: I think a group of sisters, who have experienced a form of abuse themselves, a spiritual abuse, who can identify with the victims and also be nonthreatening and take seriously what they hear from victims, I think that is very relevant.
NAMIGADDE: Religious sisters traditionally live out vows of poverty, chastity and obedience. That means that sisters Theresa and Danielle rely on donations for everything from food to lodging.
ALETHEIA: Obviously, like, the work that we do doesn't generate money, so.
LUSSIER: Yeah. No one wants to pay us to talk about abuse (laughter).
ALETHEIA: Yeah, and we wouldn't want to ask them to.
NAMIGADDE: But making money was never the point - helping survivors is. John Bellocchio says he was abused as a young teen in New Jersey by Theodore McCarrick, a former cardinal who was defrocked in 2019 by Pope Francis after the Vatican found widespread accusations of abuse. Bellocchio found the sisters online and decided to reach out.
JOHN BELLOCCHIO: They just listened. And having somebody in a habit listen helped. And so I had to rebuild my faith life, and I'm doing that bit by bit, and the sisters are a big part of it.
NAMIGADDE: The sisters say it's both deeply meaningful and harrowing work.
LUSSIER: So it is the fringes of the church that will heal the church, that are needed for her renewal in this present moment. We're desperate for what they have to say. What they see that we can't see is what we need to be able to live most authentically who we are in this moment as the church.
NAMIGADDE: The sisters are meeting this summer with a few women who might be interested in joining the order. The first step is the same it's always been for anyone thinking about joining a religious order in the Catholic Church, come and see.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: (Singing) Give thanks to the lord of lords.
NAMIGADDE: For NPR News, I'm Adora Namigadde in Mount Sterling, Kentucky.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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