Reflections on the situation of nuns in the Roman Catholic Church with illustrative examples from Spanish-language literature

Abstract

In 2018 and 2019, the Vatican newspaper “L’Osservatore Romano” published two ground-breaking articles describing the psychological, physical and sexual abuse of nuns by clergymen of the Roman Catholic Church. The aim of this paper is to present the situation of consecrated women and the relationships between priests and nuns. The text will also attempt to discover possible reasons for the clergymen’s inappropriate behaviour towards nuns. To achieve this goal, the author refers to the status of women in the Catholic religion and examines documents issued by the Church that relate to the life and the functioning of women’s religious communities. The second part of the paper presents fragments of Spanish-language poetry and prose whose authors or heroines are nuns. The selected texts address the problem of the clergy’s discrimination against nuns.