When it comes to abuse in the Church we automatically think of those whose victims are minors. But there is another scourge that is even more underestimated and less talked about: violence against nuns. A few days earlier, father Francis He explained in a video message that “the Church cannot attempt to hide the tragedy of abuse of any kind.” An attempt to show the phenomenon to which religious women are victims was made by a nun, the Togolese Maria Lembo who wrote a doctoral thesis on this subject at the Institute of Psychology of the Pontifical Gregorian University and about which he spoke in an interview with Giovanni Panettierie in the National Quotidiano.
The complaint
Sr. Lembo’s investigation began by investigating twelve cases of assault in Africa and photographed the process of raping priests. The nun-psychiatrist told the reporter that the rapist generally “tries to gain the nun’s trust, make her feel important,” with the goal of “making her feel totally committed to him.” .
Between shocking stories Sister Mary heard, in her investigation into abuse in Africa, that “a nun was raped several times by a priest who prevented her from using any form of contraception.” After getting pregnant several times, the victim was forced to do so by the priest interrupt and finally left the dress.
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It is not the first time that a woman has opened the door to abuses committed by women religious. The first voice to rise was Sister’s Rita Mboshu Congoa Pope-appreciated Congolese theologian who, speaking at a Vatican seminar in 2015, denounced the condition of many African nuns, who are so poor and needy that they become victims of “their benefactors, who subdue and exploit their bodies” until they stay pregnant and are expelled from the monasteries. Sister Mboshu told the Spanish magazine Vida Nueva that “some priests even use false theological arguments to justify their behavior”.
public scandal
The scandal became public in 2019 when the deposit was dedicated to the women’s world Donne Chiesa Mondo de The Roman Observatory collected various testimonies from religious that denounced not only sexual abuse but also psychological and spiritual ones. So great was the uproar that even the Pope intervened, admitting on the flight back from Abu Dhabi that “there were clerics within the Church who did this too; in some cultures it is a bit stronger than in others”. On that occasion, Francis had also paid tribute to the work of his predecessor to combat this disease by saying this Benedict XVI he was “a man who had the courage to do a lot about it” by cleaning up within a religious organization in which there was this “sexual (…) corruption”.
Shortly after the uproar caused by this investigation, there was a revolution in the editorial office of the Holy See supplement with the resignation of the director, Lucetta Scaraffia who complained about an attempt to appoint a commissioner by the heads of Vatican communications. “To tell you the truth, we’ve been annoying before. (…) Then we certainly proved to them with the history of abuse that they were right to be cautious,” protested the teacher in an interview granted to Il Corriere della Sera the day after the change of direction.
The Rupnik case
Recently, the name of a prominent minister has been accused of abuse by several nuns and former nuns at different times. It’s about father Markus Rupnik, an artist famous for his mosaics, about whom the Society of Jesus has collected a dossier with thirteen female testimonies deemed “credible” by the delegate, Father Johan Verschueren. Rupnik was found guilty in 2020 by the then Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith of having acquitted a woman who had sinned with him exactly five years earlier against the sixth commandment.
Serious allegations have also been made against the Jesuit in recent months, such as a nun who told the newspaper Domani that she had been visiting his studio since the 1980s and that he had sexually, psychologically and spiritually abused him by the Jesuit “Theological Justifications of Gender” and “An Exclusive Relationship pornographic“.