Sister Sally Butler, a nun, social worker and activist who blew the whistle on the sexual abuse of children in the parish where she once worked, died on Oct. 6 at the residence of her order, the Sisters of St. Dominic of Amityville, in Suffolk County, N.Y. She was 93.
Her niece Kate Morris said the cause was a sudden respiratory illness.
Sister Butler was teaching high school and living in her order’s convent when she and two other nuns were invited to join an experiment at the Church of St. Michael and St. Edward, in the Fort Greene section of Brooklyn. They and three priests would work together ministering to tenants in the housing projects that surrounded them, helping the Black and Latino community there connect with social services and providing other forms of support — pastoral duties once reserved for male clergy. It was 1968, a convulsive but hopeful time, and their innovative assignment was championed in the press and by their diocese.
Sister Butler loved the work. She was especially close to a single mother, Ramona Cruz, and her son, Carlos. Ms. Cruz was ill, and when she died in 1974, 12-year-old Carlos’s first call was to Sister Butler, who had promised to look after him.
He moved into the rectory, where he lived with the priests and spent time with several other young boys who helped out with chores. There was roughhousing among the boys and the priests, who liked to dump buckets of ice down the boys’ pants — “the ice game,” they called it — or give them “pink bellies,” slapping the boys’ stomachs until they turned bright red. At the time, it all seemed to be in good fun, and Carlos appeared to be happy. He called Sister Butler “Mom.”
But by the late 1970s, the experiment had fizzled, at least internally. There was tension between the priests and the nuns. One priest, Father Brian Callahan, had an explosive temper, and when Sister Butler reported him to church officials for alcohol abuse, he retaliated by firing her and another nun, Sister Georgianna Glose, evicting them from the rectory. The third nun, Sister Sheila Buhse, had left a year earlier, after having her own difficulties with Father Callahan.
Sister Butler and Sister Glose moved into an apartment nearby, while Carlos moved in with relatives. The two nuns went on to start social service centers and earn degrees in social work, but they continued to attend Mass at their old church.
Then, in 1993, Sister Butler learned from the mother of two boys who had been helping out in the church back in the 1970s that they had been abused by all three priests — and that Carlos had, too. During the time they were being abused, the woman said, one of her sons had tried to burn down the church, and the priests had sent him and his brother to a reformatory.
When Sister Butler left the woman’s apartment, she recalled later, she almost walked into a truck.
For two years, the three nuns tried in vain to persuade the woman’s sons, now young men who struggled with drugs — one would later die of AIDS — to tell the church authorities about their abuse. Carlos was also reluctant to come forward. One of the priests had died, but the other two were living, and the nuns wanted them removed from their parishes and reported to the police.
Finally, the nuns met with Msgr. Otto Garcia, the chancellor of the Brooklyn Diocese, who assured them that he would handle the issue internally. As for legal action, he reminded them that the statute of limitations had expired long ago.
Years passed, and the nuns heard nothing. They were told to stop reaching out.
So Sister Butler set out to learn more. She discovered the scale of child abuse by clergy throughout the country — and the extent of the cover-up by church authorities. She connected with lawyers who represented survivors, and with groups like Road to Recovery that supported and counseled them. She learned that, as adults, those survivors often suffered from sleep deprivation, depression, panic attacks, substance abuse and flashbacks, and that they frequently struggled to keep jobs and maintain healthy relationships. In 2002, when The Boston Globe broke the news of the abuse cover-up in Boston’s Catholic parishes, she went to the press. She approached Daniel J. Wakin, a Times reporter who was covering the Boston scandal.
Church officials told Mr. Wakin that of the two priests still living, one, Father Callahan, had denied the charges, and the other, Father Anthony Failla, had confessed. They said they had removed Father Failla from his parish duties at a church in Florida, where he had been serving for 20 years, and had sent him to counseling. But they hadn’t told his parishioners of the allegations against him or informed the three nuns of their efforts. When Mr. Wakin reached out to Father Failla, he denied that he had confessed, declared that the charges were untrue, and said that he had retired of his own volition.
After the article came out, the nuns heard nothing from the church or their fellow nuns. “It was a furious, empty silence,” Sister Buhse said.
Nuns in their order ignored them at convent meetings. Attending Mass made them physically ill. “It eats at your soul,” Sister Butler told Mr. Wakin. But she continued to speak out, addressing church groups and meeting with victims.
“Sally stood out, because back then there were so few church insiders who were speaking out,” said Anne Barrett Doyle, a director of BishopAccountability.org, a digital archive of Catholic abuse. “What made her so particularly unusual is that she spoke out for victims of color. To this day, victims of color are still overlooked in the church abuse crisis, and in some ways they are the most vulnerable victims.”
In a 2003 talk, Sister Butler said: “They don’t trust the church, and they don’t trust the criminal justice system either, and with good reason. Last year, a Jamaican man named Sylvester Wilson accused a priest well known to us and still serving as a pastor in Brooklyn. Mr. Wilson was charged with threatening the priest and spent 12 days in Rikers Island.”
As Ms. Barrett Doyle put it: “Sally had a kind of holy outrage. She was a person of unusual conscience.”
Sally Martha Butler was born on March 11, 1931, in the Bronx. Her mother, Sara (Bennet) Butler, was a secretary; her father, Charles Butler, was a typesetter.
Sally grew up in Bayside, Queens, and entered the novitiate in Amityville, N.Y., on Long Island, in 1949, a year after graduating from high school. Later, she earned a Bachelor of Science degree from St. John’s University, in Queens, where she studied education; a Master of Arts from the College of Saint Rose, in Albany, N.Y.; and a Master of Social Work from Hunter College, in Manhattan.
She was also an accomplished pianist who played keyboards in her order’s band, the Guzman Girls, and played the organ, with great enthusiasm, for one of her early parishes. As a fellow nun said, “She didn’t just play, she swayed as she played.”
In addition to her niece Kate, Sister Butler is survived by another niece, Sally Morris Pardee.
Whistle-blowing can be lonely work. Many whistle-blowers are shunned by their communities or lose their jobs. In 2012, Ms. Barrett Doyle reached out to a few she had long been in touch with, including Sister Butler and the Rev. Ronald D. Lemmert, who exposed an abusive priest in his former parish in the mid-1990s and suffered repercussions as a result. They and others formed the organization Catholic Whistleblowers.
The group’s mission is to encourage more whistle-blowers to act, to support them after they do, and to urge the Vatican to be more transparent. To date, said Father Lemmert, a former prison chaplain at Sing Sing and the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility who is now retired, members of Catholic Whistleblowers have written numerous letters to dioceses and to current and former popes. They have never received a response.
“Sally didn’t have a fear in the world about standing up to anybody who stood in the way of justice,” said Robert Hoatson, a former priest and an abuse survivor, who founded Road to Recovery and is a member of Catholic Whistleblowers. “She had a deep faith that God would take care of everything, but we had to do the work.”
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