As of: March 13, 2024, 9:51 a.m
By: Moritz Bletzinger
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“When I reported it, they closed their eyes,” says the nun from Italy.
She reports on a rape that no one in the church wanted to know about.
Rome – Even as a child, a nun learned about the monastery as a place of harassment and deprivation.
A quiet life under the glow of the saints.
Punishments and humiliation were the order of the day until things got worse.
Abuse in the monastery: Catholic nun from Italy breaks her silence
As one of the few of many people affected by abuse in the church, the nun from Italy is now breaking her silence.
The now 73-year-old tells her story to
the newspaper
La Repubblica .
She wants to speak, but prefers to remain anonymous.
The paper gives her the fictitious name Sister Giusi.
Her ordeal began in 1963, when Sister Giusi was twelve years old.
The girls were forced to work in the monastery, washed their hands sore on the laundry of 160 priests and seminarians, were not allowed to wear bras and had to quietly accept what they were told, she describes.
Asceticism was like torture, the abbey like a prison.
As a child she suffered under strict hands in the monastery, and as a young adult it got even worse: A sister from Italy reports on her suffering in the Catholic Church.
(Symbolic image) © Pond5Images/IMago
“One time I was buzzing and the supervisor treated me like a prostitute,” she remembers.
The classic punishment: kissing the floor 50 times, still relatively harmless.
Other penances included eating on one's knees at the penitential table or standing in front of the altar with outstretched arms like on a cross.
Beatings were also not uncommon.
Giusi did not experience sexual abuse as a child in church.
Many others, however, do.
Just last year, the NGO “Rete l'Abuso” published a report on sexual abuse of Catholic priests in Italy.
The frightening number: 418 cases in recent years, 164 convicted priests - and an unreported number that is likely to be much higher.
Priest raped nun on mission in Congo – “Today he is a priest in Belgium”
When Sister Giusi fell, the ordeal continued in the late 1980s: the nun always wanted to get out into the world.
In 1988 she went on a mission to Africa.
But it was in the Congo that she experienced sexualized violence for the first time, she says.
In the middle of the night, a priest came into her room and raped her.
She was a virgin until then and still remembers the pain - physical and mental.
And the priest?
“Today he is a priest in Belgium,” says Giusi.
However, this cannot be checked.
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What to do?
Giusi didn't know what to do next.
“I didn’t talk to anyone, I didn’t know anyone in Africa,” she says.
In the church it is primarily a question of power.
From then on, she locked her bedroom door at night.
But the sexual harassment didn't stop, even back in Italy.
Sexual abuse in the Catholic Church – nun did not report men: “They wouldn’t have believed me”
Sister Giusi reports two incidents.
In Rome, a provincial father is said to have insisted on taking her with him in the car to work at a renowned clinic.
Then he suddenly changed course, stopped in a dark corner and laid his hands on her.
She rejected him, he then masturbated in the car and then continued the drive to the clinic in silence.
In the second case, Giusi reports that the rector of a Catholic university called her into his office and placed her hand on his erect penis.
“I was paralyzed,” she remembers.
Sister Giusi did not report the men.
“They wouldn't have believed me.” She sent an anonymous letter through the provincial father, and the priest was then transferred.
Giusi later found out that she was not his only victim.
"I reported it, other women reported it, the fathers knew... and didn't do anything."
Nun reports on attacks in church: Still a problem today
The story about the rector was similar.
Years later, Giusi told a fellow parishioner that he had bad memories of this priest.
She will probably never forget what he said: “And what did he answer me?
We know it, we know it… I still have those words in my head today.
They knew because he didn’t just do it to me.”
Today the church seems to be a little more sensitive to attempts at cover-ups.
In March 2024, Pope Francis ordered the removal of Polish Bishop Andrzej Franciszek Dziuba from office because of “negligence in the handling of cases of sexual abuse by some clergy against minors,” according to a statement from the Polish Church.
Abuse cases went unnoticed for years: “Everyone made sure that I didn’t cause a scandal”
In 2000, Sister Giusi couldn't take it anymore.
After the church refused to allow her to take time off to care for her ailing parents, she removed her veil.
36 years in the monastery were over.
“When I left, my sister told me: You have finally decided to get out of this hell,” she says.
However, her story remained secret at the time.
“Everyone made sure I didn’t cause a scandal.”
Associations are still fighting to draw attention to victims from Italy.
While the Polish bishop had to resign, clergy in Australia are on trial and in Chile the assembled bishops' conference has offered to resign, not much seems to be moving in Italy.
This despite the fact that, according to Rete l'Abuso, the numbers are higher than in any other country.
The report caused little outcry in Italy.
And from the Vatican?
Be silent.
“Rete l'Abuso” spokesman Francesco Zanardi told
Deutschlandfunk
: “In Italy, cases of priest pedophilia are still only mentioned in passing.
Here we lack awareness of the problem.
Also from the state authorities, the media and the public.” Ludovica Eugenio from
Adista
magazine says: “The situation is very serious and that is precisely why the institutions are afraid to reveal the truth.”
(moe)