One of the nuns who were victims of the Jesuit Rupnik: “She invoked the Holy Trinity so that we could have sexual threesomes”

Horror usually has a familiar face.

And in the case of the abused nuns of the Loyola community in Slovenia during the 90s, it was always the same.

The level of atrocity, however, increased as the years went by.

Marko Rupnik was for decades a priest and reputed leader of a spiritual community known throughout the world.

A guru

There was no notable religious space, including the Almudena Cathedral in Madrid, that did not have one of his famous mosaics.

That is why, in part, he was always the pretty boy in the power circles of the Catholic Church.

And that is why, everything now indicates, he managed to avoid controls and justice for so long, despite the flagrant evidence that he psychologically and sexually abused a dozen nuns from his community.

His case is also a complete manual of dubious management of abuses by the Vatican.

On Wednesday morning, just five years after the summit that the Pope held in the Vatican to debate and change the dynamics of prevention and punishment of sexual abuse in the Church, two of the nuns abused by Rupnik gave a talk of press.

They were accompanied by his lawyer, Laura Sgrò, and Anne Barrett Doyle, co-director of the American association Bishop Accountability.

The former nuns explained that they estimate that another 20 women from that community were abused by the Jesuit and that “a wall of silence” was built around the case that they hope can now be broken.

It was the first time they showed their faces.

And his story went far beyond the request for “justice and truth.”

Gloria Branciani, born in Rome in 1964, recounted in detail, interrupting her speech every now and then due to emotion, how she was manipulated by Rupnik when she was still a medical student.

The priest, he explained, managed to do with her what he wanted “so that her spirituality would grow.”

The woman recounted the sexual abuse committed in the mosaic studio where she worked in Rome.

Also the times Rupnik took her to a porn movie theater.

“For him it was an art form.

It was the way to reach the collective orgy.

Every feeling had to be overcome.

He told me that she was too sweet, tender, insecure... and that was going to be good for me.

He took me twice to X rooms in Rome.

And you could see that he was a regular there,” she said.

But also when he walked her and forced her in the car where he took her through Slovenia “so she could get to know the culture.”

The most serious thing from a theological point of view was when Rupnik forced her to have relations with another woman and he - another nun also recruited by the Jesuit - "invoking the Holy Trinity" and ensuring that this was "his maximum representation."

“When I resisted at first, she told me that I didn't want to because she was envious and couldn't live sexuality spiritually.

He was sexually aggressive, but he said it was healthy aggressiveness.

The serious thing is that among us we cannot talk about it out of fear.”

In this case, and that is one of the key parts of the case, Rupnik would have incurred a canonical crime of False mysticism.

That is, passing off a pure and simple sexual practice as a religious experience.

These types of crimes do not prescribe and that was precisely the type of crime that the Doctrine of the Faith refused to recognize at the time.

Father Rupnik, a 70-year-old Slovenian Jesuit priest, was a star.

A successful and charismatic religious artist who managed to put his signature on important works in the Apostolic Palace of the Vatican (with some mosaics in the Redemptoris Mater chapel).

But last December 2022, the Society of Jesus revealed that Rupnik had been denounced by several nuns of the Loyola Community in Ljubljana, of which he had been spiritual father.

The victims had gone to the Doctrine of the Faith dicastery to report cases dating back to the 1990s, but the Vatican body in charge of analyzing and judging these cases ruled that the statute of limitations had expired.

The problem with this case is that it directly affects the highest authority of the Doctrine of the Faith and calls into question the role of the pontiff.

According to the chronology published on its website by the Society of Jesus, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith issued a decree in May 2020 that punished the Jesuit with excommunication for the crime of “absolution of an accomplice of a sin against the sixth commandment”, but shortly after, with an extraordinary act, the excommunication was revoked.

It is unknown for what reason the artist's excommunication was lifted.

The Pope is the only authority that can do so, while others suggest that the sentence could have been challenged by Father Rupnik and later changed to other types of sanctions.

Subscribe to continue reading

Read without limits

Keep reading

I am already a subscriber

_