Two Nuns Are on a Mission to Reach Catholics Jolted by Abuse Scandals – Maggie Phillips

The Sisters of the Little Way of Beauty, Truth, and Goodness are establishing a new religious order in the diocese of Lexington, Kentucky. These Catholic religious sisters have as their mission “listening and solidarity with people on the fringes of the Church, especially those who have been wounded, scandalized, or abused by members of the Church,” they say on their website. If that sounds like a big undertaking—the Catholic Church may be losing as many as nine out of 10 cradle Catholics—the Sisters of the Little Way would agree. As survivors of adult clerical abuse themselves, they are not naively hoping for a quick fix. They know from experience that institutional reform doesn’t happen overnight. But they have faith—and a growing number of supporters inside and outside the church.

As of right now, the Sisters of the Little Way consist of two members: founders Sister Theresa Aletheia and Sister Danielle Victoria. Both women were vowed sisters in a Catholic religious order, the Daughters of St. Paul, when they experienced what they describe as spiritual abuse from a priest, a popular spiritual director at retreats they attended with their order. In 2024 the sisters came forward with their story in The Pillar, an independent Catholic news outlet, and described boundary-crossing and inappropriate behavior on the part of the priest in one-on-one counseling sessions, and in the case of another, unnamed sister, assault. The sisters’ claims went up the chain all the way to the Vatican. After two years of radio silence, a decision came from Rome—a disappointing outcome from the sisters’ point of view. With little more than personal accounts with no witnesses, the Vatican said the most it could do was suspend the priest from offering spiritual direction for five years. The Oblates of the Virgin Mary, the order for which the priest was the head rector when the alleged abuse occurred, refused to address the affair or even disclose whether he was still performing his priestly duties, even after he was accused of hearing confessions in a diocese where he had been prohibited from ministry. Allegations of abuse against this priest have since emerged from another order of religious sisters.

Last year the Sisters of the Little Way released a podcast series, Descent Into Light, and once again shared their stories, this time as part of an in-depth exploration of the institutional and cultural barriers they encountered in trying to safeguard themselves and other sisters, obstacles they say are common in many abuse situations.

After they went public with their experiences, the sisters wanted to expand on their account to illustrate how institutional culture can create the conditions in which abuse can take hold. “We chose to use our own story because really it could have been anyone’s story,” said Theresa Aletheia. “We’re using it kind of as a setting to talk about abuse in general, and the dynamics of abuse.” Both secular and religious environments can be reluctant to air their dirty laundry in public, unwilling to disrupt the good working order of an organization, and can scapegoat whistleblowers. But the “few bad apples” approach that ignores systems and processes only creates more problems in the long run. “Safeguarding means a safe environment for everyone,” said Theresa Aletheia. “Part of that safety is ensuring due process.” Without it, an institution looking to save face and shield its systems from scrutiny may be just as likely to scapegoat an innocent priest accused of abuse as a victim who comes forward. “If we don’t address the deeper cultures, then we’re not actually creating a safe system for anyone,” she said.

“The sisters understand intimately that a church response of words, monetary settlements, programs in response to the crisis does not yet get to the heart of what is needed,” said Father Thomas Berg, visiting professor at Notre Dame’s McGrath Institute for Church Life and author of Hurting in the Church: A Way Forward for Wounded Catholics. “What is so desperately needed in the church and from church leadership is real empathy for victims, for those who have been scandalized.”

In their outreach to those on the fringes of Catholic life as well as who have left entirely, the sisters see themselves as missionaries. They are inspired by the motto of the founder of Western monasticism, Benedict of Nursia: “Ora et Labora,” prayer and work. Accordingly, they intend to build what they call a “digital monastery,” the inspiration for which are medieval monasteries like one in Cluny, France. Founded in the 10^th century, Cluny was renowned as a Romanesque architectural masterpiece. During its 12^th century high water mark, Cluny functioned not only as a center of spiritual development, but as a beacon of reform. The flagship in a network of monasteries, Cluny also set the pattern for monasteries in the middle ages as laboratories for artistic, architectural, and philosophical exploration. The sisters want to update this paradigm for the digital age, but they don’t want it to exist purely in the cloud. “We’re actually talking about something very concrete,” said Theresa Aletheia.“We would like our mother house to be kind of a center for people to come and to either heal from experiences of spiritual abuse, or to create content with these issues in mind.”

How precisely that will look in the future depends on the gifts, talents, and credentials of future members. Currently, the sisters invite abuse survivors to reach out via their website to set up a meeting so they can tell their own stories. “Since we are just two people,” they caution on their site, “we are limited in the support we can provide. As we grow and receive new members into our community, we hope to expand the resources we offer to survivors.” 

They determined last year that the first step in building their digital monastery would be to create content of their own. A podcast seemed like a natural fit for both women, who have communications backgrounds. But Descent into Light was about more than catharsis for themselves and their listeners. Both Theresa Aletheia and Danielle Victoria know for themselves how hard it is to come forward with experiences of abuse, and for them the medium was the message. “The way in which we created something needed to model, first and foremost, what it is we were asking of people,” said Sister Danielle Victoria. “Audio really created a space that was personal, intimate.” 

Sharing this one-on-one experience in their own voices, the intimacy of the audio format was intended to put the power in the hands of the listener, an experience of vulnerability that many abuse survivors share. At the same time, the podcast format gave the sisters time and space to go deep on a complex experience that, while negative in many ways, also strengthened their own faith and sense of mission. Rather than create a straightforward chronology or something resembling a prurient true crime series, the documentary’s high production values—the music, sound editing, and thematic organization of the episodes around the various stages of grief—were intended as a fulfillment of the “Beauty” part of the name of the sisters’ association. Danielle Victoria likens the vision behind Descent into Light to a painting. “At the heart of wanting to create something that really did resonate with people, we wanted to create something that was like art,” she said, “To create a lot of space for people to have questions, and to kind of make their own sense of the picture.”

Disaffected Catholics have options when it comes to content. They can listen to ex-Catholic podcasts like Leave, Laugh, Love, which has interviewed a religious abuse survivor who left a convent. They can share their own experiences online on the r/excatholic Subreddit. But there aren’t many internet venues by and for practicing Catholics that discuss topics like abuse or spiritual manipulation. “A lot of Catholic content creators—abuse is not something that is a component in their content,” said Theresa Aletheia. As a revert to Catholicism, she is concerned about the crop of young people attracted to Catholicism, who like many young people are finding religion through the internet. “You’re coming into a situation with rose-colored glasses, you’re really idealistic, you’re really ready to give of yourself completely,” she said, “That’s a dangerous situation if we haven’t prepared ourselves as a church to receive these people and to receive them in their idealism. So I celebrate people coming into the church, but I also question these influencers who kind of want to focus on the positive and the triumphalistic aspect of everything, instead of, how are we prepared to receive these people, and are we prepared, have we done the necessary self-examination personally and as a church, to create safer spaces for these people who are entering in?”

It would seem that the sisters have discovered a significant niche in the podcast market. In a report Sisters Theresa Aletheia and Danielle Victoria shared at a January online stakeholder meeting for supporters, according to conventional podcast industry wisdom, the first week downloads of Descent into Light put it in the top 10 percent of podcast listenership. At the time of the meeting, four months after the limited series’ initial release, it was in the top 25 percent of podcast downloads since its release in October 2025.

The release of Descent into Light was the first real step in realizing their vision of a Catholic religious order that can accompany those who have been hurt by the church. But they acknowledge they are attempting a tricky balancing act by acknowledging the church has a problem from inside. “It doesn’t really feel like the church is ready to really receive well people’s stories,” said Danielle Victoria. “But to ignore [abuse] or to treat it as a side issue is really how we got here.”

Theresa Aletheia and Danielle Victoria have already come a long way since they wrote the statutes for the Sisters of the Little Way of Beauty, Truth, and Goodness in 2022, a massive break that meant leaving the Daughters of Saint Paul. They stepped out of vowed religious life completely and lived once again as lay peoplewhile they waited for approval from a bishop to begin their new religious association, the first step in founding an official religious order. Their leap of faith was rewarded and in 2023 the Sisters of the Little Way began as a 501(c)(3) and religious association based in Oregon. With the backing of a bishop,by 2024 the two women were reinstated as religious sisters and were studying abuse prevention at the Gregorian Institute in Rome. They established a board of directors. In 2025, in addition to releasing their podcast, Sisters Theresa Aletheia and Danielle Victoria studied the intersection of faith and mental health at the University of Notre Dame’s McGrath Institute, spoke about digital mission work, and consulted with other religious orders on abuse prevention and approaches to safeguarding the vulnerable. 

This year the sisters hope to purchase their mother house, a place to work and pray like any other religious order, and which they say will enable them to accept up to five new members by 2027. 

“We really are kind of at a flex point where we have so many people who have reached out to assist us,” said Danielle Victoria. Supporters with expertise have come forward to assist with the administrative and infrastructural work, everything from help with grant writing, governance, and financial planning. Donors are coming forward, too. “People have been reaching out to us with larger donations, which has been so humbling,” she said. “Even people outside of the church.” 

But the sisters are clear-eyed about future challenges given the sensitive nature of their work. “I don’t know if we know that we’re ready for what that really asks of us,” Sister Danielle Victoria said with a big smile. “It’s a kenosis (self emptying). At every stage of this journey, we have been asked to give over our idols.” And they know from experience to expect resistance in calling church leadership to self-assessment and repentance. “What the abuse reveals is that we’re missing something essential in the gospel in this moment in our history,” Danielle Victoria said.

Not everyone is ready to take the first step of admitting there’s a problem. In Descent Into Light, the sisters recount criticism from members within their previous community who said they were creating more suspicion against innocent priests.

Luke Burgis, director of programs at the Catholic University of America’s Ciocca Center for Principled Entrepreneurship, appears in Descent Into Light talking about the Italian concept of the bella figura—projecting a flawless “beautiful figure” in public. In March, Burgis wrote on X that when he mentioned the abuse crisis in the Catholic Church on a recent panel, a fellow Catholic approached him to say he wished he had used “‘any other example.’” The man told Burgis he felt sorry for the priest who had been on the panel with him. “I am a Catholic who loves the church, by the way,” Burgis wrote. The attitude from the man who approached him, he wrote, “speaks to the depth of the problem.”

Many bishops (with their diocesan lawyers) continue to deal with abuse primarily via litigation and retributive justice: They focus on punishing the perpetrator and financially compensating the victim, Father Thomas Berg says. “But most survivors don’t want money,” he said. “They settle for that because it’s the best they can get in terms of some kind of just outcome. And in this whole process, victim-survivors have too often been horribly re-traumatized by the way they have been treated in the church.”

In the past decade, Berg and other advocates for clerical abuse survivors, including the Sisters of the Little Way, have favored what is called a restorative justice approach. “Restorative justice focuses first on healing the victim,” he said. “On the victim’s need to be heard, seen, and believed.”

The sisters are almost depressingly realistic in their belief that abuse cannot be totally eradicated this side of heaven. It’s why they envision their order less as the church’s first-string players against abusers than its coaches, putting their safeguard training to work to identify institutional weak points in order to change the church’s culture of accountability. “We think we can outsource our danger,” Danielle Victoria said. “We’re never going to create a completely safe environment. What is safe is knowing your own potential for danger and for harm.” 

Board member Paul Fahey believes the sisters have the potential to change church culture from the bottom up through their work, whether it’s working with church leadership to reform systems, providing a physical place of welcome for survivors among their community at their mother house, or reaching those scandalized by the church through their digital apostolate. For the sisters, Descent into Light is the first step in that work. In showing their own wounds in such a public and vulnerable way, the sisters are letting other abuse survivors know they are not alone, and that someone wants to hear their stories. With their order, the sisters plan to help abuse survivors figure out how they too can build something beautiful and new on top of the ashes. But first, they must give them the tools.

“If I don’t have the vocabulary to understand my own experience, that’s like another layer of injustice, because without that vocabulary I’m not able to talk to others and get support,” said Fahey, a limited licensed counselor who hosts workshops on spiritual abuse. “[The sisters’] podcast has given people a vocabulary, not only to understand their own experiences and for their own healing, but also to know what are the bad experiences when talking about spiritual coercion. That equips people to just say, ‘I don’t need to tolerate this anymore.’”

“I think reform really happens there too, when on the ground, enough Catholics say, ‘We don’t want to put up with it,’” Fahey said. But the cultural reticence surrounding abuse in many Catholic spaces means the average person doesn’t always know how to articulate something that can be as slippery as grooming, or manipulation by a clergy member in the guise of spiritual direction. A gut feeling that something isn’t right isn’t always enough to advocate for justice.

In ministering to the abused, the Sisters of the Little Way intend to restore this essential aspect of the Christian gospel to the center of the church. “Vulnerability is the way in which God emptied himself to enter into our human experience,” Danielle Victoria said. “He’s elevated and dignified our vulnerability to something sacred.”