A woman who was sexually abused as a child by her Catholic priest uncle has revealed she was also groomed and molested by a nun in her teens.
Trish Cahill, now 66, claims she was told she’d ‘burn and blister in the fires of hell’ if she told anyone about the sexual abuse her uncle Rev. Daniel Millard was inflicting on her between the age of five and 11.
She claims she then had her ‘body, mind and soul’ stolen from her by Sister Eileen Shaw, a teacher at St. Catherine School in Glen Rock, during a 12-year campaign of emotional and sexual abuse.
Because of the abuse Cahill claims happened to her as child, she was vulnerable and lost when she met Shaw at the age of 15.
Trish Cahill, 66, claims her ‘body, mind and soul’ were taken by a nun while she was in her teens
Cahill claims she was told she’d ‘burn and blister in the fires of hell’ if she told anyone about the sexual abuse. She poses with sister Eileen (left) at her parents’ house in Ridgewood
Ms Cahill, from Glen Rock, New Jersey, revealed Shaw – 21 years her senior – groomed her, bought her gifts and got her to open up on the abuse by her uncle.
She alleges the nun then used her vulnerabilities to seize her opportunity and begin abusing her.
‘For her to be nice to me was just fantastic. She cared like she wanted to be with me. She was 36. I was 15. Who gets to hang out with a 36-year-old?’ Cahill told the Huffington Post. She added: ‘But the woman was a thief who did not keep her vows.’
Cahill says she was ‘vulnerable and lost’ aged 15 when she met the sister. Cahill (right) greets Sister Eileen Shaw, the nun she says sexually abused her, at an event at Paramus Catholic High School in 1970
Cahill poses during a visit to Sister Eileen’s beach house in Seaside Park, New Jersey
The pair started going on camping trips, when they would sleep in the same sleeping bag and the abuse would continue.
Cahill claims she was abused by the sister having already been abused by her uncle
Ms Cahill alleges the nun taught Cahill her how to gamble on horse races, introduced her to alcohol and drugs and discouraged her from dating boys.
Cahill claims the nun would take off her religious medal and place it on her while they had sex as an act of manipulation.
‘She would take it off of herself at night and put it on me, and then we would have sex. Not a relationship, sex,’ Cahill told the news outlet. ‘And then, in the morning, it would go back on her. It was the seal of confessional. It worked.’
She also claimed the two would sleep together in the same bed with other nuns in the room – yet the abuse was never reported.
More than a decade of abuse at the hands of Shaw, now 87, plunged her into years of drug abuse and alcoholism, Ms Cahill said.
The Diocese of Camden told the Huffington post Cahill’s claims against her uncle were the only allegations that had ever been put and were not deemed credible.
They also cited a 2005 article in which Cahill’s cousin told the local paper she did not believe her uncle abused Cahill.
Marylou Millard Ferrara told the Boston Globe: ‘While the family has enormous sympathy for her as we have in the past, we think her problems should be explored in a psychiatric office and not in the pages of the newspapers.’
Cahill says she has come forward to encourage other victims with similar stories of nuns to speak up as the Catholic church faces a reckoning over the crime of clerical sexual abuse.
This February the Pope, for the first time ever, acknowledged the systematic abuse inflicted by priests and bishops in the church.
The pontiff even pointed out that nuns have been victims of sex abuse themselves within the church.
But Ms Cahill believes stories like hers – in which the nuns are the perpetrators – are being buried and forgotten. ‘Why are they not coming out? They don’t have any other survivors to see what’s happened. They’re the only one.
‘The boys thought they were the only ones for a hundred years, [but now] the girls think they’re the only ones.’
More than a decade of abuse at the hands of Shaw, now 87, plunged her into years of drug abuse and alcoholism, Ms Cahill said