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A woman protests against the Indian bishop Franco Mulakkal
Photo: imago stock/ imago/Hindustan Times
"Praise be to the Lord!" said the Indian Bishop Franco Mulakkal last Friday when the verdict was pronounced after a hundred days of hearings.
Mulakkal had been accused of raping a nun while visiting her convent in Kerala, southern India.
13 times between 2014 and 2016, that was the allegation.
With an acquittal.
This is how the process comes to an end, the first of its kind in India: Standing for the first time
a bishop on trial for allegedly raping a nun.
A case that brought women onto the streets across the country and distressed the entire Catholic Church.
If you now think that it's in India, it's about a nun, that has nothing to do with my life, then you're wrong.
This case is drawn on the misogynistic template that can be applied to the Catholic Church and the secular rest of the world alike.
In this case, however, and this is the good news, a group of nuns, against all walls of silence, made sure that a possible offense had to be heard.
From the start, the Catholic Church showed no interest in investigating the case.
The police in Kerala also delayed the investigation after the report.
It was and is the struggle of five nuns.
They opposed two systems at once that make it all too easy for men who might be perpetrators.
First, a church whose faithful around the world have been demanding answers to the many abuses and cover-ups within the system for decades.
In Germany and the USA alone, clergymen abused thousands of children.
Second, an Indian society where a woman is raped every 20 minutes, where a 2017 study found that 47 percent of women on the street had at least once encountered a man who exposed his genitals in front of them. Where women, when reporting rape, are all too often pressured by the police to remain silent or are accused of taking the blame themselves.
In April 2019 I researched the nun's case in Kerala, spoke to many witnesses in the process and visited the nuns in their convent in Kuravilangad, a cottage between banana trees in the country. To be clear, that doesn't make me a judge of whether the rapes actually happened. To an observer of a system of suppression and character assassination against the side of the plaintiff, however.
Superiors had advised the plaintiff to remain silent and to pray to God.
The church cut the nuns' budget.
Throughout the trial, which included 2,000 pages of indictment and in which 25 nuns and 11 Catholic priests testified, witnesses were intimidated;
their statements were videotaped because there was too great a risk that they would be blackmailed afterwards.
The nuns received police protection in their convent.
A former judge spoke of an "unholy alliance" between the court and the church, which is very powerful in Kerala.
The alleged victim sent registered letters to representatives of the Vatican and the Pope, which DER SPIEGEL was able to see.
In which she begs to finally be heard.
To which she never received an answer, as she said.
In her last letter she wrote: 'Your Eminence, I have been waiting for justice from the Catholic Church.
But now I have no choice but to take legal action.«
The investigation only picked up speed when the other five nuns staged a unique protest, gathering outside the Kochi City Courthouse every day and shouting "justice."
At some point, hundreds of Catholics, Hindus, Muslims, politicians and women's rights activists joined the protests and put pressure on them.
In a conversation with me in 2019, the spokesman for the bishops' conference did not want to know anything about threats against the nuns, saying it was the other way around: "These nuns are threatening the church."
And Mulakkal, the accused, said when I reached him on a WhatsApp call three years ago: "The allegations are false, fabricated and evil." Such rape allegations have become fashionable in India.
He is the victim of a vendetta.
The judges' verdict now states that too much time passed between the alleged rapes and the nun's complaint.
It is an internal church feud, the plaintiff strives for more power and a better position.
The plaintiff's statements are partly contradictory and inconsistent.
You could not describe the rapes in detail.
Perhaps the plaintiff's exceptional psychological situation was too extreme to make more precise statements.
Perhaps the bishop is innocent.
What remains in any case:
The clarification of the allegations should have been vigorous from the start.
Just as the accused must not be left without assistance, no plaintiff must be left alone.
Women and men across the country are criticizing the court's decision.
The head of the police investigation into the case called the verdict "extremely disappointing" and that he had assumed that Franco Mulakkal would be convicted.
The verdict sends “a wrong signal to society”.
One nun said: »The case is not about a single woman or a single nun, it is about many.
We will fight on until the end of our lives.«
The nuns will appeal.
Franco Mulakkal and the women will soon meet again at the Supreme Court.
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