Father Marko Ivan Rupnik, a Slovenian priest and renowned Catholic artist, famous for his mosaics in over 220 churches and sanctuaries around the world, is at the center of serious abuse accusations, from which he has never publicly defended himself, made by a growing number of former nuns.
Among them, Gloria and Mirjam, who after years of suffering and attempts to gain a hearing within the Church, have chosen to publicly denounce what they have suffered, adding unpublished statements to the testimonies already given in the past, highlighting how the cases had been reported to their superiors many years ago.
They are joined by Sister Samuelle, of the Monastic Fraternity of Jerusalem, who breaks the silence to tell her experience. The three nuns tell their story to the microphones of “Le Iene”, in an investigation by Roberta Rei and Marco Occhipinti, broadcast tonight, Sunday 9 March, in prime time, on Italia 1. The report also includes the words of the lawyer Laura Sgrò, author of the book Stupri Sacri, which reconstructs the dramatic events experienced by the victims.
Sister Samuelle begins by saying: “I have suffered several psychological abuses, but with sexual characteristics, by Marco Rupnik. If thirty years ago the Church had listened to Gloria and the others, 25 years later there would not be my story.” Mirjam, a former consecrated member of the Loyola Community, says she suffered a “strong psychological and spiritual influence and abuse of authority” by the priest.
Gloria, another former nun of the Loyola Community, who filed a complaint for sexual abuse, recounts her experience because: “I would never want what I had to go through to happen again to other religious women.” Her story dates back to 1985, when she was 21 and a medical student at Sapienza University in Rome. On the advice of a sister from her parish, she turned to Father Rupnik for spiritual guidance.
“He called me very often on the phone, asking me how things were going, even what I was wearing, if I had prayed,” Gloria says. The priest quickly became a central figure in her life, convincing her that only through him could she grow spiritually. From what she says, over time, the relationship took on increasingly ambiguous contours: “He invited me very often because he said I could be his model. I can tell you that when he painted, even naked from the waist down, he was excited; therefore, his painting was linked precisely to physical excitement. At the end of the first confession, he hugged me for a long time.
Then he told me that these gestures were important to start a new path in life.” Gloria also says that from then on the hugs would become more intense, followed by the first kisses. Rupnik would justify these acts as a spiritual gift shared between them: “A pure sexuality.” When Gloria would try to oppose him, Rupnik’s reaction would be violent, attacking her psychologically and isolating her from the rest of the community. “If I didn’t let him hug me or caress me, he would start talking badly about me to others,” she says. Mirjam confirms this mechanism of manipulation: “He told me that I couldn’t be friends with Gloria anymore. That way it was easier to control us.”
Gloria continues her story, describing abuse that would be increasingly serious, up to real non-consensual sexual acts. “…I felt that that time my resistance was definitely over, in fact when he came back, he hugged me and even tried to masturbate me, or, I don’t know, he put his hand on his member saying ‘I’m at your disposal’, which I didn’t do. In Slovenia there was a very violent masturbation, in the car, in which I lost my virginity. He said it was beautiful, that there had been no oppression.” The abuse would continue with pressure for oral sex, despite her obvious discomfort: “…He forced me not only to masturbate but also to have oral sex, even though he saw that I really felt like throwing up, to tell you…You could see that I was sick, but he insisted,” she says.
Rupnik would justify these acts with theological motivations, going so far as to propose a three-way sexual relationship: “He said that we had to invite another sister to live sexually with us and that she would act as a trait d’union between us as the Holy Spirit did the union within the Trinitarian relationship. So a three-way sexual relationship.” Gloria says that when she refused, he accused her of selfishness and jealousy. Exhausted by the pressure, she finally accepted. “We went to the house of a friend of his who was away and there we actually had a three-way relationship. …
Full intercourse only happened once, one of his attempts, he threw himself on me and I stopped him and said ‘but I could also get pregnant’ and he said ‘but if it’s all a game, you can also have an abortion like a game’. I was just devastated so I didn’t even react anymore,” she says. The pressure continued until she attempted suicide: “I didn’t exist as a person anymore, so I said ‘I’m going to die in a very beautiful place, the sanctuary of La Verna, in the woods around there’. But there I felt strongly that the Lord didn’t want my death.”
After this experience that she would have undergone, Gloria found the courage to report everything to her superior, to Rupnik’s spiritual father, to the archbishop of Ljubljana and to the superior provincial of the Jesuits. “He told me: ‘If you speak, it is your word against mine, I will make you look crazy.’ In fact, they told my parents that I was schizophrenic when I ran away from the community.”
Gloria wasn’t the only one to report: “Before me, the sister with whom we had a threesome also reported, then other sisters started saying ‘me too, me too, me too’.” But despite the numerous reports, for thirty years nothing changed. Rupnik continued to practice as a priest and artist.
Decades later, new accounts of abuse have emerged, such as that of Sister Samuelle, who says she was invited to night meetings with a specific recommendation: “’Please be careful not to let anyone hear you because people might have strange ideas seeing you come down to me at 10 pm,’ the priest told her. During dinner he would blow me kisses from a distance, I felt terrible, I would look at my plate, eat and after three seconds I would look up just to check that he had stopped. He did this in several places. He created a climate in which I felt bad, I was afraid of him. My heart was beating so much, I was sweating so much.
They were signs of high anxiety.” Then she adds: “One time I found myself with him down there, he came over, talked to me about the mosaic and put his hand on my shoulder. Then his hand went down behind my back, at a certain point he stopped and started playing with my bra with his finger. Then I pulled away, and he looked at me very surprised: “But Samuel, what is it? Look, it’s nice that we can do this together, because I’m a priest, you’re a quiet nun, … all pure’.” Samuelle says that after four years of these and other episodes she decided to end her collaboration with the famous mosaicist and returned to France to live as a hermit nun in his atelier where she still lives today.
The nuns who claim to be victims are now calling for justice and concrete measures to ensure that similar situations never happen again. In 2020, Father Rupnik was excommunicated for absolving a person with whom he had had a sexual relationship, but it was revoked a few weeks later. In 2022, the Jesuits sent the results of some internal investigations to the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, which, however, considered the accusations time-barred and did not initiate any trial. Pope Francis reopened the case, but nothing more has been heard of it since. Although an official body of the Church has contacted Sister Samuelle, the situation does not appear to have changed. This is the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors and Vulnerable Persons, chaired by American Cardinal Charles O’Malley, Archbishop of Boston.
“Personally,” Samuelle says today, “I received an email from his secretary. The message was clear: ‘We know that many of you have been abused by Marco Rupnik. We know that the Church has not listened to you, we are ashamed of this and we want to pay attention to the victims.’” Strong words, which seemed to promise a change of direction. Following this communication, a meeting was also held on Zoom in October 2023. Yet, despite the Commission having listened to Sister Samuelle at length via video conference, since then all has been silent. “In the meantime,” says lawyer Laura Sgrò, “while child abuse, despite its gravity, is now a cleared issue, the phenomenon of abuse of nuns remains largely unknown. Not only is the number of nuns who have suffered violence unknown, but there is another piece of data that is totally ignored: the number of abortions procured among abused nuns. It is a real phenomenon, but there is no official detection of it.”
A year and a half after the beginning of the canonical process personally requested by Pope Francis, Marko Rupnik is still a priest of the Catholic Church. He has never publicly clarified his position regarding the accusations and continues to remain in a grey area. The only official note on the case is the one published by the Vicariate of Rome in September 2023. It states that the Visitor found “gravely anomalous procedures, the examination of which has generated well-founded doubts even on the request for excommunication itself.” Words that suggest how far the affair is still from a real resolution.
SOURCE: Dag O Spia