A group of former Benedictine nuns have called a shocking report about widespread spiritual abuse within the Sacré Coeur congregation as a half-hearted exercise obscuring the role of local and Roman Church officials.
The 10 former members of the Benedictine Sisters of the Sacred Heart of Montmartre (BSCM), who left the congregation separately because of its manipulative mother superior, said the report last month was much-needed but had many “blind spots”.
Led by Rosaline de Romanet, forced out in 2004 after succeeding the longstanding prioress general whom the report branded a “sadistic pervert”, they questioned the report’s claim that the congregation had now “calmed down”.
“The ‘patients’ are at best in long-term convalescence. How can they be declared healed?” the group asked.
The BSCM, based at the Sacré Cœur basilica overlooking Paris, requested the report on the sect-like behaviour of former prioress general Mother Marie Agnès and its nine priories in France.
The report’s shortcomings began with the commission writing it, the 10 wrote, since it included “no psychiatrist, no person from outside the Church, and no religious figures” who might understand religious life.
It only used the BSCM’s archives, not those of the Archdiocese of Paris, and interviewed all current sisters but only 37 per cent of ex-nuns. “Silencing them perpetuates a system of control and discrimination,” they wrote.
The analysis stops at 2012, ignoring the next 13 years when around 40 sisters left, about as many as departed in the 36 years between 1976 and 2012. “It’s a gaping hole,” they wrote.
Romanet told Famille Chrétienne she was initially a “puppet” of Mother Marie Agnès and accused Church authorities of lax oversight of the former prioress, who died in 2016.
A 2004 apostolic visitation was “a botched job”, she said, and an apostolic commissioner hushed up the problem, as did the former Archbishop of Paris Cardinal Jean-Marie Lustiger. His successor Cardinal André Vingt-Trois dismissed it as a “women’s squabble” to be resolved internally.
After the report came out last month, the dioceses of Paris and Versailles admitted failures, but the Vatican has not responded, the ex-nuns’ letter said.
According to Romanet, there is a tension between the BSCM’s contemplative and apostolic natures. Church authorities must “ensure serious and vigilant monitoring because many abuses persist, despite what the report says”.
She continued: “Not a day goes by that I haven’t prayed for all the sisters and that the beauty of their vocation may be rekindled.”