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.