Five complaints from alleged victims of former Jesuit Father Marko Rupnik were filed this morning at the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith where an investigation is underway. Last October, it was Pope Francis himself who reopened the case of the former Slovenian Jesuit and well-known mosaic artist, providing a special exception to the statute of limitations. The testimonies of alleged abuse suffered were filed by the lawyer of the women victims, Laura Sgrò. These are two already known, and three others not yet known.
The testimony of two victims
Last February, two alleged victims of the Jesuit Rupnik came to light for the first time in public.
They are Mirjiam and Gloria, two Slovenian women who are former members of the Ignatius of Loyola Community. "We met in the community - Mirjam explained in a press conference with Gloria at her side - we were all young girls, full of ideals but these very ideals together with our training in obedience were exploited for abuses of various kinds: of conscience, of power, spiritual, psychic, physical and often even sexual".
"We found ourselves in front of a rubber wall - they said in a press conference at the headquarters of the Foreign Press in Rome -, let the wall crumble". The victims are two former nuns, one Italian and the other Slovenian. Gloria, the Italian one, told her story, from the time when a young medical student in Rome met Rupnik who was already considered a spiritual father of reference.
"At the beginning - she said - I felt disoriented, confused because Rupnik entered my spiritual world, also distorting my relationship with the Lord, he entered with the authority of the spiritual father, of the confessor and also as a guarantor of the charism of the nascent community". A story made of abuse, he said, but above all "a true abuse of conscience", in which "manipulation and plagiarism" dominated, "Rupnik is able to manipulate many people around him by creating a very large context network, it was a abusive context".
"Today we told our story, our desire is that the truth be recognised, the wrong we have suffered, that we are also given visibility because we are many but they ask us to remain silent, to disappear in some way, they discredit us and is no longer acceptable." Gloria says so, one of the two former nuns of the Loyola Community who today publicly spoke about the mental and sexual abuse suffered by the Jesuit priest Marko Rupnik, also a well-known artist.
Gloria responded to a specific question about what she wants to say to Pope Francis today, the fifth anniversary of the summit on child abuse called by Francis himself in the Vatican. According to the two former nuns who came out today, there are around twenty nuns abused within the Community over the years out of a total of 40 members.
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