LONDON – The nun no longer goes to confession regularly, after an Italianpriest forced himself on her while she was at her most vulnerable:recounting her sins to him in a university classroom nearly 20 years ago.

At the time, the sister only told her provincial superior and her spiritualdirector, silenced by the Catholic Church’s culture of secrecy, her vows ofobedience and her own fear, repulsion and shame.

“It opened a great wound inside of me,” she told the *Associated Press*. “Ipretended it didn’t happen.”

After decades of silence, the nun is one of a handful worldwide to comeforward recently on an issue that the Catholic Church has yet to come toterms with: The sexual abuse of religious sisters by priests and bishops.

An *AP* examination has found that cases have emerged in Europe, Africa,South America and Asia, demonstrating that the problem is global andpervasive, thanks to the universal tradition of sisters’ second-classstatus in the Catholic Church and their ingrained subservience to the menwho run it.

Some nuns are now finding their voices, buoyed by the #MeToo movement andthe growing recognition that adults can be victims of sexual abuse whenthere is an imbalance of power in a relationship. The sisters are goingpublic in part because of years of inaction by church leaders, even aftermajor studies on the problem in Africa were reported to the Vatican in the1990s.

The issue has flared in the wake of scandals over the sexual abuse ofchildren, and recently of adults, including revelations that one of themost prominent American cardinals, Theodore McCarrick, sexually abused andharassed his seminarians.

The extent of the abuse of nuns is unclear, at least outside the Vatican.Victims are reluctant to report the abuse because of well-founded fearsthey won’t be believed, experts told the *AP*. Church leaders are reluctantto acknowledge that some priests and bishops simply ignore their vows ofcelibacy, knowing that their secrets will be kept.

However, this week, about half a dozen sisters in a small religiouscongregation in Chile went public on national television with their storiesof abuse by priests and other nuns and how their superiors did nothing tostop it. A nun in India recently filed a formal police complaint accusing abishop of rape, something that would have been unthinkable even a year ago.