VATICAN CITY (AP) — A Vatican magazine is denouncing how nuns are often treated like indentured servants by cardinals and bishops, for whom they cook and clean for next to no pay.

The March edition of "Women Church World," the monthly women's magazine of the Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore Romano, hit newsstands Thursday. Its expose on the underpaid labor and unappreciated intellect of religious sisters confirmed that it is increasingly becoming the imprint of the Catholic Church's movement for gender equality, a spinoff of the #MeToo movement.

A nun identified only as Sister Marie describes how sisters serve clergy but "are rarely invited to sit at the tables they serve."

While such servitude is common knowledge, it is remarkable that an official Vatican publication would dare put such words to paper and publicly denounce how the church systematically exploits its own nuns.