Doris Reisinger, an abuse survivor and former nun, speaks at a news conference in Rome Feb. 19, 2019. (CNS/Paul Haring)
Doris Reisinger is one of four speakers in a webinar series on spiritual abuse on April 28 and May 18 by the Union of the European Conferences of Major Superiors. Reisinger was the recipient of the 2020 Christine Schenk Award for Outstanding Young Catholic Leadership by FutureChurch for her testimony and writings about spiritual and sexual abuse of women, particularly women religious, by clergy.
She has also been critical of the structures and culture that keep most women in a position of unquestioning obedience to a superior, as FutureChurch notes. That culture, she said in her address (under her former name Doris Wagner) at the Voices of Faith event Overcoming Silence - Women s Voices in the Abuse Crisis in November 2018, is what prevented her from speaking out for two years about her own case of being raped by a priest. She had entered rel