Coming to light are widespread reports of rapes of nuns — young women from India’s and Africa’s poorest families

…Catholic leaders continue to trivialize the growing scandal of sexual abuse in Africa and Asia. What started as a hurricane of sex scandals in the First World may well become a tsunami of charges from the Third World.

The rumblings from India and (especially) Africa, where the Catholic Church is seeing its greatest growth, are growing louder.  The news from these places exacerbates our shock and concern: The sexual abuse of children by clergy is now coupled with widespread reports of rapes of nuns — young women recruited from India’s and Africa’s poorest families.

In Africa, … the church’s ranks are hefty with converts only a few generations removed from the illiterate, poor, uneducated innocents that missionaries first discovered living in tribal communities. Totally unaware of concepts like gender equity or criminal punishment for sexual assault, many of those locals came to a church that offered food, medical care and education in exchange for religious conversion.  If there were crimes also committed around them, congregants paid for their survival with their silence.

The AIDS pandemic in Africa and India is said to have made nuns “safer” sex partners and, also for that reason, targets of priests seeking sex. (Some nuns also reported sexual abuse by mothers superior.) The women, culturally brainwashed not to challenge men or female figures of authority, felt they had no choice, and the priests took further advantage by arguing (lying – Ed) that Catholic rules for priests required them to have sex “only with virgins.”

More allegations came from Sister Jesme, an ex-nun from the Indian state of Kerala, who told of sexual abuse and forced homosexual relationships in a 2009 autobiography. But when the book was released, a spokesman for the Syro-Malabar order of the Catholic Church in India dismissed it as a “book of trivialities.”

And the author of the source for this story, Mary Ann Sorrentino, closes with what seems a profound question but is, in fact, easily answered:

When that other shoe falls, the world can wonder once more how Rome kept everyone silent for centuries and why fate has chosen this moment for the truthful floodgates of pent-up suffering to spill open?

Fate did not choose this moment. It was consciously chosen by atheists who choose to not be polite when discussing a global criminal cult.

The seeds of this revolution into truth and dropping of false & unearned respect were planted by notables such as Christopher Hitchens, Victor Stenger, Sam Harris, and so on. I’m sure that the educated reader could conjure up a dozen more.

Websites, blogs and podcasts have played no little part in mobilising the sane against those who have been rendered either insane or corrupt (or both) by religion.