THE medical missionary who revealed that nuns have been raped by priests and forced to undergo abortions agonized over bringing the abuse to the Vatican's attention, but "didn't want anyone else to be victimized."
Maura O'Donohue, a nun and a doctor, "was deeply hurt and shocked by the incidents," said a friend and colleague, Sister Isabelle Smyth of the Medical Missionaries of Mary in Dublin, Ireland.
Smyth said the shy and diminutive Ireland native - whose life's work is devoted to health-care issues and assisting the needy in developing countries, primarily in Africa - was outraged that her confidential 1994 report to the Vatican was leaked last week to newspapers in Kansas City and Rome.
"Sister Maura received this information in confidence in her professional capacity as a medical doctor," Smyth said.
"At the request of those who gave her the information, she reported the situation to the church in confidence. She would have never felt at liberty to go public with this information."
O'Donohue, who's in her late 60s, became a professed sister in the Medical Missionaries of Mary in 1953 and received her medical degree from Dublin's University College four years later.
She first went to Africa in 1958, working at various hospitals in Nigeria. She also worked as coordinator of medical missionary services in Ethiopia, and was the country's director of famine relief during the severe food shortage of 1984-1987.
The bespectacled nun spent the next decade as AIDS coordinator for the London-based Catholic Fund for Overseas Development (CAFOD), before a two-year stint as director of programming at the Catholic Medical Mission Board's Manhattan office.
She is now back with CAFOD, for which she is working in Kenya.
"Maura has devoted her life to health-care issues and helping the poor in developing countries," said CMMB's spokeswoman, Shirley Stephenson.
"She really is a great and remarkable woman."
O'Donohue presented her damning report to Cardinal Martinez Somalo, the head of the Vatican's Congregation for Holy Orders.
"Sexual harassment and even rape of sisters by priests and bishops is allegedly common," O'Donohue wrote in her explosive report, which detailed sexual abuse in 23 countries, including the United States.
"Everyone here knows that this problem exists and . . . it seems to be getting worse instead of better."