Three women who claim to have suffered abuse at the hands of the
Slovenian Jesuit priest Marko Rupnik joined together with their lawyer,
Laura Sgrò, to ask the Vatican for justice on Wednesday (March 12),
while calling attention to the growing number of religious sisters
denouncing abuse in the church.
“We will continue our fight for this. We will continue fighting to
make sure their voices are heard,” Sgrò said. “The issue of abuse
against religious women must be addressed,” she added.
The appeal was made at the Spazio Sette bookstore in Rome during the
presentation of Sgrò’s new book, “Sacred Rapes,” which tells the stories
of three nuns, Gloria, Mirjam and Samuelle, as well as other religious
sisters who claim sexual, psychological and spiritual abuse within the
church.
In her book, Sgrò talks about the first time a nun, whom she calls
Maria, walked into the legal office asking for her help after being
raped by a priest who then forced her to have an abortion. Maria, she
writes, told her that she had been shunned from her religious order
after the mother superior was informed of the abuse. Sgrò said she never
saw Maria again.
“No one believes them,” she said, “When a nun is raped by a priest,
it’s always the nun who seduced him, she is the one who somehow
possessed him and who knows what the poor devil had to do to escape her
advances.”
Since that day, Sgrò said, she has received hundreds of letters,
visits and emails from religious sisters relaying their experiences.
When Gloria Branciani walked into her office and told her that she had
been sexually and psychologically abused for years by Rupnik, Sgrò
believed her.
Branciani claims that Rupnik, an artist of international renown and
great influence in the church, abused her after she joined the Loyola
community of Mengeš in Slovenia in 1987, which he founded with Sister
Ivanka Hosta. Branciani alleges that Rupnik raped her and forced her to
have sex with another sister under the guise of replicating the Holy
Trinity. Branciani also claimed he abused her while she modeled for his
mosaics of the Virgin Mary that currently adorn sanctuaries all over the
world.
“I lost my identity,” Branciani said at the event. “I couldn’t feel my feelings anymore.”
She reported Rupnik in 1993 to her mother superior and as a result
was forced to leave the order. Rupnik was also forced to leave the
community, but no explanation was offered about what had happened.
Slovenian-born Mirjam Kovac, who was also a member of the community
and a close friend of Branciani, said that after the accusations the
religious order became more controlling of its members. “I was told that
Gloria was not the right person to choose as a friend,” she said at the
event, adding that the order isolated the sisters form the outside
world. “We were manipulated,” she added.
“I felt guilty. I could have taken her defense, and I didn’t,” Kovac,
who is a canon lawyer at the Pontifical Gregorian University, said.
Branciani and Kovac have both left the religious order and are no longer nuns. They were the first to come forward to denounce Rupnik and his order.
In 2020, the Vatican department for doctrine excommunicated Rupnik
for absolving a woman he had sexual relations with during confession. An
excommunication can be lifted in the church if the person repents for
their sins, and Rupnik’s excommunication was lifted soon after.
“It OK if you repent. It’s OK if your excommunication is lifted. But
you still have to go to prison,” Sgrò said, adding that Rupnik never
publicly acknowledged or apologized for the abuse.
Sgrò currently represents five women who claim to have suffered some
form of abuse at the hands of Rupnik, but she claims to have proof of at
least 15 more. She said one of the victims, who goes by the name of
Martha, was among the crowd on Wednesday but would not speak out of
fear.
The Jesuit order expelled Rupnik from its ranks in February 2023, but
while Pope Francis lifted the statute of limitations on the case, there
is no report about the state of the canonical trial.
The question of whether to continue to display his artwork remains
controversial. From the sanctuary at Lourdes to the ongoing project at
the Aparecida Cathedral in Brazil, consisting of an area of 43,000
square feet, Rupnik’s religious mosaics adorn over 220 sacred sites
around the world.
The Vatican has yet to issue a direct statement on how religious
sites should handle the already installed mosaics; however, Rupnik’s
artwork has remained clearly visible in video recordings of Pope Francis
at the Domus Sanctae Marthae at the Vatican, where Francis lives. And
the head of the Vatican’s communication department, Paolo Ruffini, said
during a press conference in June 2024 that in the past “removing,
deleting or destroying art has never been a good choice.”
Cardinal Sean O’Malley, head of the pope’s Pontifical Commission for
the Protection of Minors, condemned the continued use of Rupnik’s art,
while some bishops overseeing the sacred sites displaying the artist’s
work, including the sanctuary at Lourdes and the St. John Paul II
National Shrine in Washington, D.C., are considering the option of
removing his mosaics.
Sister Samuelle, who has not made her last name public and is a member of the Monastic Fraternities of
Jerusalem, is the last woman to have come forward reporting abuse by
Rupnik. The French nun, who is also a mosaic artist, worked alongside
Rupnik on several of his projects around the world and described the
sites as “a preying ground. I became the prey.”
Samuelle described numerous cases of mental and sexual abuse,
including atop the mosaic installation scaffolding, adding that Rupnik
would reassure her that his advances were aimed at helping her on her
spiritual journey. “I was scared,” she said, “I was scared of him every
time I saw him coming.”
Sgrò and the women she represents sent a letter to Catholic bishops,
embassies and religious orders around the world asking them to take down
Rupnik’s art. “The problem is not if the art can be separated from the
artist,” Sgrò said, “but if the art can be separated from the abuse.”
“How can I kneel and pray before an image of Mary that was made while an abuse was taking place?” she added.
For Sgrò, the case for Rupnik’s alleged victims has become a battle
to raise the voice of the religious sisters in the world. “Those who
hurt women, like what happened to Gloria, should not be moved from one
parish to another. They should go to jail,” she said.
Sgrò’s new book is one of a slew of books, podcasts, comic books and
activists raising awareness on a topic that is widely known at the
Vatican but rarely addressed. Many nuns fear speaking out and face
backlash from their communities, have no money or prospects if they
leave their religious order and are often forced into silence, Sgrò
said.
“I hope Maria calls me one day. That Martha decides to speak
publicly,” she said, her eyes looking through the crowd. In a later
phone conversation with RNS, she explained that she was looking for
Maria. “We must ensure that these manipulated and violated women become
free once again,” she said.
