Testimonies of Rupnik victims collected and published as a book. If Pope Francis had lived longer, this scandal would have overwhelmed him.
The ex-nun's complaint: "Rapes and group orgies. Rupnik raped me and said: you are going against God"
In Sacred Rapes (Rizzoli) the lawyer Laura Sgrò collects the testimonies of former nuns against their spiritual father, Marko Rupnik, and crumbles the web of silence that envelops abusers and the people who protect them
Rome, Laura Sgrò's office. Maria (fictitious name) enters. She is a nun. She says she was raped by a priest. "They also killed my son". Forced abortion. Maria cries, she doesn't know yet whether to expose herself. That is the first and only time she meets the lawyer. Gloria, Mirjam and Sister Samuelle, on the other hand, do not, they go to Sgrò's room and choose her as their lawyer. They all report the abuses committed by Marko Ivan Rupnik, a theologian, well-known artist and founder of the Aletti Center, former spiritual father of the Loyola Community.
The thread that runs around the chilling testimonies collected by Sgrò in the book Sacred Rapes (Rizzoli) twists in each chapter until it becomes barbed. Former nuns challenge the silence against abuses within the Church. In this powerful and brutal essay, the author defends the need for truth and becomes a megaphone for those who have chosen not to remain silent. Sgrò often speaks to her "courageous girls", reconstructs stories made of pain, confusion, loneliness, without sparing us details, and invites everyone (even that Maria) to come forward. With her writing, she crumbles the web of silence that envelops abusers and the people who protect them.
"Mine is the story of an emptying," Gloria Branciani tells 7. It begins in 1987 when she enters the Loyola Community of Menges and they entrust her with Marko Rupnik as her spiritual father. He is her confessor, he knows all her fragilities. He demands from her total availability and obedience, two traits that characterized the charisma of that community located 15 kilometers from Ljubljana. Rupnik begins a spiritual, psychological, sexual manipulation: he hugs her, kisses her on the mouth, rapes her. "He forced me to have orgies with him and another sister. In confession he told me: you don't want to do them because you are jealous, envious and self-centered."
How much room is there for consent, between obedience and the will of God?
She answers frankly: "My obedience has changed over time, at first I said no to Rupnik, then I obeyed because if I refused him, he attacked me and claimed that I was going against God. At a certain point I experienced a very deep identity crisis, there was an abuse of conscience". She went through the most difficult experience at 27: "Rupnik claims that at that time I had to assume dominant attitudes also from a sexual point of view. So he took me to a porno cinema twice. There I understood that it was better to die than to live. I ran away from the community and spent a night in the woods. Suddenly I felt that the Lord did not want my death. In that feeling there was a pain that saved me, feeling pain meant being alive". Branciani reported the sexual abuse to the ecclesiastical authorities, but was not believed. In 1994 she left the community.
Mirjam Kovac is also a former nun. "I realized after 30 years that I too had suffered spiritual and conscience abuse," she admits. In 1989 she was sent to Rome to study canon law (she remained there to do a doctorate) and Rupnik forced her to sever all ties with Gloria because in his opinion they were too close. For a period she could not see or speak to her parents. At that time Kovac was the secretary of the founder and mother superior Ivanka Hosta. She says: "When Gloria ran away, at least 20 sisters came to me to tell me about the abuse they were suffering. I said to talk to Hosta. But she never admitted the truth about the reasons for Rupnik's departure." The climate in the community became oppressive. She lists the prohibitions: "I did not have the freedom to choose my confessor, I could not pray where I wanted. In 1996 I left, I was 34 years old."
The Loyola Community was placed under special administration. It should have been dissolved within a year from 20 October 2023, but, Sgrò claims in the book, it still exists.
The Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith has concluded its investigations into the Rupnik case and is working to establish an independent tribunal.
How has your relationship with faith changed? Mirjam answers: «In recent years I have felt an increasingly thick fog inside me. I began to see around me what the problems of other consecrated women were. At first I looked for another community, then I understood that although my relationship with God had grown, the Church was no longer the place I was looking for. There is a need for purification in the institution".
Sister Samuelle has not returned to a community either.
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