A recent article in a Vatican magazine on widespread exploitation of nuns in the Catholic Church has found many takers in India, home to the world’s largest number of women religious. “A welcome statement but late in coming,” Sister Teresa Kotturan, former vice president of the Sisters of Charity of Nazareth, reacted to the March 1 article in the monthly, “Women, Church, World.”

Fr Paul Thelakat, who has arbitrated several disputes between nuns and priests in Kerala, southern India, too says the “cry of the magazine from Rome is too late.”

Nevertheless, the fact that an official Vatican publication has “come out with some painful truth within the Church” has cheered Presentation Sister Shalini Mulackal, the first woman to head the male-dominated Indian Theological Association. The article in the monthly women’s magazine of the Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano is based on the comments of several unnamed nuns. It describes the drudgery of nuns who work as cooks, cleaners, waiters on tables for cardinals, bishops and priests. It also narrates how some work in the residences of “men of the Church, waking at dawn to prepare breakfast and going to sleep once dinner is served.”

They also keep the house of priests and bishops in order and clean and iron the laundry for them for “random and often modest” remuneration. The situation is no better in India where patriarchal norms and culture in the Church and society shackle women religious, says Sister Kotturan, who once headed the Indian province of the congregation based in Kentucky, United States. She is currently the NGO Representative at the UN Sisters of Charity Federation.